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The first Trump term was marked by two impeachments that threatened to tarnish the legacy of his administration, namely, the Ukraine impeachment scandal and the aftermath of Jan. 6. But now, after both of those efforts were undermined by new evidence, their legacy could rebound on President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats. 

Donald Trump survived both impeachment attempts by House Democrats during his first term, but ultimately lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. When he departed the White House on Inauguration Day in January 2021, just weeks after the Capitol riot, Trump had the lowest approval rating of his presidency. Many suggested his political career might be over. 

Democrats moved to impeach Trump the first time with a simple storyline: The then-president abused his power by requesting an investigation of Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine when Joe Biden’s son had done nothing wrong. After the Republican Senate acquitted the president, this narrative was repeated by both candidate Joe Biden and friendly news anchors during the election. 

“Multi-part conspiracy”

In the second attempt, Democrats tried to impeach Trump for allegedly inciting a riot against the Capitol building by claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. After the second impeachment also failed, the Democrat-led Jan. 6 Select Committee echoed this narrative and ultimately asserted that Trump engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the election results and incited an insurrection.  

However, during Joe Biden’s term in office, evidence uncovered by dogged congressional investigators and the media have turned the premises of those dual impeachment pushes upside down, which in many ways exonerated the once and future president. 

Republican Senator Ron Johnson, who will chair the investigating arm of the powerful Senate Homeland Security Committee, said congressional Republicans, with a new Washington, D.C., trifecta, may still have an interest in getting to the bottom of Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine and the conduct of the Democrat-led Jan. 6 Select Committee. 

“I think the American people deserve the truth here,” Senator Johnson, who represents Wisconsin, told the John Solomon Reports podcast. 

The Ukraine Impeachment

“President Trump has falsely accused your son of doing something wrong while serving on a company board in Ukraine,” CNN anchor Anderson Cooper claimed setting up an interview question for Joe Biden during the campaign. “I want to point out there is no evidence of wrongdoing by either one of you.”

Evidence uncovered by House Republicans and Just the News in the intervening years show that, in fact, there is significant documentary evidence that Hunter Biden and his father engaged in an influence peddling scheme in Ukraine while the younger Biden was serving on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. 

The final report from House Republicans’ own impeachment inquiry into President Biden over the issue furnished several pieces of evidence to back this claim. Most importantly, evidence first reported by Just the News showed then-Vice President Biden changed official policy by calling an “audible” on a flight to Kyiv, linking a $1 billion loan guarantee for the struggling country to its firing of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky.

This evidence contradicted claims from several government witnesses and congressional Democrats during the 2019 probe that Joe Biden did not change U.S. policy and that the Ukrainian prosecutors were not investigating Burisma at the time Hunter Biden worked for the company. 

Now, Sen. Johnson says Joe Biden’s pardon of his son paves the way to call in Hunter Biden for his complete testimony on how his business role intersected with his father’s political responsibilities in Ukraine.

“But what is interesting is, with the hunter Biden’s pardon, he has no Fifth Amendment right not to testify and tell the truth, and so he could be we could prosecute him for lying to Congress,” Sen. Johnson said.

“He’s going to have to answer truthfully. So that’s a real possibility. Again, we’d have to get our ducks in a row. You know, you know me, I want documents, I don’t want to just come in for a show trial,” he continued.

The Jan. 6 Probe

“The President of the United States inciting a mob to march on the Capitol and impede the work of Congress is not a scenario our intelligence and law enforcement communities envisioned for this country,” the committee’s Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., wrote in the final report. 

“Donald Trump lit that fire,” Thompson added. “But in the weeks beforehand, the kindling he ultimately ignited was amassed in plain sight.”

However, evidence uncovered by House Republican investigators led by House Administration Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., show that the Jan. 6 Committee selectively framed its narrative, ignored significant evidence of security failures from Democratic leadership and the Pentagon, and even appeared to have coached witnesses. 

“If I were Liz Cheney, I’d be very concerned about being prosecuted for witness tampering. I think what she did in that J6 hearing, as well as Bennie Thompson everybody else participate in that sham of a committee, it was grotesque,” Sen. Johnson said. 

Just the News reported in October that, while vice chairwoman of the select committee, Cheney used an encrypted phone app to directly and indirectly communicate around defense counsel — and possibly ethical rules — with a witness who would later change her testimony in shocking fashion. 

The witness, a one-time aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson came under fire after records show that Hutchinson changed her testimony to the Jan. 6 committee after jettisoning her Trump-aligned lawyer. 

After retaining lawyers recommended directly by Vice Chair Cheney, Hutchinson filed errata sheets with the committee amending her earlier testimony and adding new, allegedly “factual” accounts, including the infamous story of then-President Trump allegedly grabbing the wheel of the presidential vehicle in anger after the Secret Service allegedly refused to take him to the Capitol.

Chairman Loudermilk has already asked the FBI to investigate then-Congresswoman Cheney for witness tampering, concluding in a December report that “numerous federal laws were likely broken” by Cheney when she “tampered with at least one witness,” Just the News previously reported.