Remember the emoluments clause of the Constitution? Boy, the Democrats sure don’t.
This, I must admit, is a bit of a surprise. During the first few years of former President Donald Trump’s administration, viewers who flipped to MSNBC on any random weeknight were liable to see Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 8 of the Constitution being flashed on the screen:
“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
Translated into Common Core English, this roughly means: Don’t use your office to grift from foreign countries, jerks. The implication was that this was somehow Donald J. Trump’s endgame; the man who had poured rivers of his personal fortune into his presidential campaign and turned his last name from the stamp of ostentatious luxury into a divisive political tripwire had really just mounted this whole exercise so he could bequeath Trump hotels in Moscow, Jeddah and Pyongyang to Jared and Ivanka. (Or whatever.)
Four years of extensive financial archaeological work on the part of the journalistic establishment failed to dig up any evidence of the mythical city of Trump Emoluments.
Meanwhile, only a year and change after Trump left office, his successor sold 950,000 barrels of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese oil company tied to his ne’er-do-well son Hunter and, um, what are emoluments again?
Some conservatives haven’t forgotten what it means, however — including Texas Rep. Troy Nehls, an outspoken Republican who has called the move “impeachable.”
(Here at The Western Journal, we’ve been chronicling Democrat and mainstream media hypocrisy for years now — long before Trump became president. We’ll make sure that America knows the truth the mainstream media won’t bring them; you can help us by subscribing.)
Just in case you haven’t been following the latest Biden administration fiasco to try to lower prices at the pump, here’s a (sorry for the pun) primer.
Do you think Joe Biden will be impeached?
In April, the Department of Energy announced it would be releasing roughly a million barrels of oil a day for six months from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve “to address the pain Americans are feeling at the pump as a result of Putin’s Price Hike and to help lower energy costs.”
This was already a controversial move, given the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — which is intended for use in the event of wars and natural disasters — had dropped in May to its lowest level since 1987, according to Reuters.
As Fox News host Tucker Carlson pointed out in a monologue last week, Biden was releasing more oil from the reserve now than President George H.W. Bush did during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 or President George W. Bush in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, “all to protect the Democratic Party from getting what it deserves in the midterm elections in November.”
But wait, it gets worse — since that oil isn’t just going to the United States. Plenty of it is going to China — including to one suspicious company in particular.
On Thursday, the Washington Free Beacon noted that 950,000 barrels from the SPR would be going to Unipec, according to a contract signed in April. That’s the trading arm of China Petrochemical Corporation, or Sinopec, a wholly nationalized Chinese petroleum concern.
“The Biden administration also claimed the Unipec sale would ‘support American consumers and the global economy in response to Vladimir Putin’s war of choice against Ukraine’ and combat ‘Putin’s price hike,’” the Free Beacon reported.
“But as the war rages on, Unipec has continued to purchase Russian oil. In May, for example, the company ‘significantly increased the number of hired tankers to ship a key crude from eastern Russia,’ Bloomberg reported. That decision came roughly one month after Unipec said it would purchase ‘no more Russian oil going forward’ once ‘shipments that have arrived in March and due to arrive in April’ were fulfilled.”
But wait, it gets worse: Infamous First Son Hunter Biden is tied to Sinopec through a 2015 deal in which a private equity firm he co-founded purchased $1.7 billion in Sinopec Marketing.
The Free Beacon reported in March that Hunter Biden “may still hold an indirect investment in Sinopec.”
Remember all those calls for impeachment of Trump under the emoluments clause? Yeah, about that, Rep. Nehls wrote in a Friday tweet:
While you are paying FIVE DOLLARS a gallon at the pump and struggling to pay your electricity bill, Biden just sold one million barrels of our reserved oil to China so his family can make a buck.
This is impeachable.https://t.co/tkxnr6jkD2
— Congressman Troy Nehls (@RepTroyNehls) July 8, 2022
“While you are paying FIVE DOLLARS a gallon at the pump and struggling to pay your electricity bill, Biden just sold one million barrels of our reserved oil to China so his family can make a buck,” he wrote. “This is impeachable.”
Carlson, for what it’s worth, also thinks this is impeachable, noting that “China also happens to be longtime business partner of the Biden family” and that the bar for impeachment has been lowered substantially by Democratic tantrums during the Trump years.
“Now, a functioning Congress would investigate this immediately. The last president was impeached for what? Having a phone call with some corrupt Ukrainian politician,” he said.
“But no, they can’t be bothered. They’re still yelping about ‘Jan. 6th was an insurrection.’ They’re trying to ban your hunting rifle.”
This investigation won’t come, however — at least not with this Congress. Since the Democrats control the House, they’re not the least worried about this petroleum deal, or the voicemail that proved Joe Biden lied about talking with his son regarding his Chinese business dealings.
They won’t look into that email on Hunter’s laptop involving a business deal with China that talked about Hunter holding 10 percent of the equity “for the big guy,” or the fact that a business partner of Hunter’s says “the big guy” was Joe Biden.
And naturally, the mainstream media that howled at every hint of alleged misbehavior in the Trump family has no interest in looking twice at anything that could make the Bidens look bad.
Come November, however, a lot of that could change. Then, all of a sudden, we might get a collective memory-jogging regarding the emoluments clause. A man can dream, after all.
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