by Frank Holmes, reporter
If Joe Biden wins the presidential nomination and gets elected this year, he may owe it all to the one person you’d never expect: Mitt Romney.
The Utah senator has had no respect for Biden since the vice president steamrolled Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, in their 2012 debate. But now that Republican investigations into Biden’s family could help re-elect Donald Trump, Romney’s speaking up for his old rival.
Romney sits on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which is seeking information about whether Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election—and that’s collided with Hunter Biden.
The committee will vote on Wednesday to subpoena a former Ukrainian embassy hand named Andrii Telizhenko to turn over all the documents he has on Burisma Holdings. The natural gas company paid Hunter Biden $83,000 a month from April 2014 until last May.
The Bidens and prominent Democrats say this is a Republican witch hunt—and Mitt Romney seems to agree.
“There’s no question but that the appearance of looking into Burisma and Hunter Biden appears political, and I think people are tired of these kind of political investigations,” Romney said last Thursday.
“There’s no question the appearance is not good,” he said.
Republican senators say they began an investigation into Ukrainian corruption and interference in the 2016 election. They only investigated the Bidens when their sources collided with the former vice president’s family.
The two investigations “may be coming together now, but that’s not how it started,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-IA.
Biden openly admitted threatening to withhold aid to Ukraine unless its leaders fired prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was probing Hunter’s role in Burisma.
The new prosecutor continued the case against Burisma, until the firm hired Blue Star Strategies, which the New York Times described as “a consulting firm run by Clinton administration veterans.”
The Democratic insiders met with Obama administration officials and the new Ukrainian prosecutor, who dropped the Burisma inquest.
Republicans smell a rat and want to subpoena documents to learn if officials made a quid pro quo with the foreign government.
The man holding those sensitive papers, Telizhenko, says he can’t hand over the most sensitive files because of non-disclosure agreements, or NDAs.
But Democrats—and Mitt Romney—bashed the investigation.
“I would hope that there’s something of significance that needs to be evaluated that would be done perhaps the FBI or some other agency,” Romney said, because it’s “not as political as perhaps a committee of our body.”
The actions of Obama-era FBI agents like Lisa Page and Peter Strzock—and its refusal to press charges against Hillary Clinton—put the body’s basic fairness in question.
But Romney said the Senate committee has “a lot of work to do on matters that are not related to Burisma. We probably ought to focus on those things.”
That’s the same line taken by the committee’s leading Democrat, Gary Peters of Michigan, who said the committee “should be focusing on issues related to homeland security.”
It’s undoubtedly music to Democrats’ ears to have a Republican repeating their talking points, just like it was when Romney voted for one of the two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump.
Romney’s vote is decisive, because Republicans have a one-vote margin…and if there’s a tie, there’s no subpoena.
The next day Romney—who has never been known for his consistency—flip-flopped and said he’d vote for the subpoena.
But Romney’s spokeswoman said he demanded the Biden hearing would be held in a “closed setting without a hearing or public spectacle” before he’d agreed to vote “to let the Chairman proceed.”
Romney may have his own reasons for wanting to quash the investigation or drop the subpoena: He has ties to Burisma himself. One of the people Hunter Biden brought onto the Burisma board to deflect Western scrutiny was none other than a Romney advisor named Cofer Black.
The senator may see that the details could get messy for him…but Utah voters told him his reelection could be in jeopardy if he keeps siding with Democrats.
Romney has been skating on thin ice for months, as leading Republicans called for Romney to be expelled from the Republican Party, and Utah legislators have drawn up a bill to let voters recall him from the U.S. Senate.
Democrats will refer to Romney when they defend Biden, the Democratic establishment’s chosen candidate for president.
But Senate Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said, Democrats deserve to know whether they’re nominating a crooked influence peddler.
“If I were a Democrat primary voter, I’d want these questions satisfactorily answered before I cast my final vote,” he said. “We are not closing our eyes to this.”
But if the investigation is kept out of the public eye, Biden can thank Mitt Romney.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”