Chuck Schumer might have finally gone too far.
The infamously partisan Senate minority leader has spent President Donald Trump’s administration playing a heckler’s role, pretending to tears over the plight of immigrant children when cameras were rolling and maliciously jeering the undeniable successes of the economy during the Trump presidency.
But in a Tuesday morning news conference, the career political hack from New York City took his criticism of Trump further than ever, insinuating without a shred of evidence that the president’s family had profited personally from deals made during Trump’s time in the White House.
In an interview only moments later, a clearly agitated Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky had a suggestion that might finally shut down Schumer:
Trump, he said, should take Schumer to court for defamation.
“You know, I’m offended and shocked that Schumer would be so scurrilous as to accuse the president and his children of making money illegally off of politics when the only people we know who have actually made money off this have been Hunter Biden and Joe Biden,” Paul told Fox News’ Ed Henry on “America’s Newsroom,” referring to the former vice president and his son.
“So Hunter Biden makes a million dollars a year, that’s documented, but Schumer simply creates and makes up and says, ‘Oh, maybe the president’s kids are making money,’” Paul said.
“[Former National Security Adviser] John Bolton is making money as we speak. He has probably already gotten the several-million-dollar advance for this book. He’s making money by testifying against the president.”
And Paul wasn’t finished.
“There is nothing in the record about the president’s kids,” he added. “So Schumer just has created this whole thing out of whole cloth and said, ‘Oh, well, why don’t we go after the president’s kids? We don’t know yet whether or not the president’s dealings with the Chinese president have something to do with the Trumps making money.’ He just made it up! Completely made it up!
“That is defamation of character and he ought to go to court and be sued for it.”’
Paul was responding to a news conference Schumer gave late Tuesday morning where he suggested out of the blue that the president’s offspring had benefited from Trump’s foreign policy.
The Schumer move was “transference,” Paul told Henry — an attempt by Democrats to divert the attention of the American public away from the millions of dollars former Vice President Joe Biden’s son “earned” as a board member of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
According to The Daily Caller, Hunter was making $50,000 a month from the gig from 2014 to 2019 despite having no experience in the field or an understanding of the Ukrainian language — not bad work if you can get it.
It’s a job Hunter Biden himself has publicly admitted he “probably” never would have gotten if his father hadn’t been the No. 2 man of President Barack Obama’s administration.
Yet, to Schumer, the documented fact that Biden’s son was making millions as a corporate stooge for a foreign company while his father was vice president is hardly worth mentioning compared with the mere possibility — that appears to be entirely made up by Schumer — that Trump family members were making money from the administration’s foreign policy decisions.
Specifically, Schumer cited the alleged potential for a Trump family payoff from Chinese President Xi Jinping, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban.
“Several members of the administration had concerns about the president’s dealings with autocrats, particularly Xi of China and Erdogan of Turkey. Did the president have financial interests at stake when he was talking to Edogan, Orban, Xi and others? Maybe his kids had some economic interests at stake,” Schumer said, apparently speaking from notes.
“And did it impact our nation’s foreign policy with those countries?”
It was a suggestion without evidence — on a par with the accusation floated in 2012 by former Sen. Harry Reid, Schumer’s predecessor as the Senate Democratic leader, that then-Republican presidential nominee had not paid his taxes.
It’s the kind of slimeball politics in which Democrats excel — as any American who witnessed the attempted character assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh could attest.
But one difference between Reid’s meritless accusation (he admitted in 2015 that it was a lie) and Schumer’s without-evidence assertion Tuesday is that Reid made a point of hurling his accusations from the floor of the Senate. Members of Congress are immune to legal action for statements made in the course of legislative business.
Schumer’s news conference statement likely wouldn’t qualify for that immunity, though a lawyer would probably argue he was only raising the possibility of corruption, not actually accusing anyone of anything. (That would be Slimeball Politics 101.)
Whether the president or his family would take Paul up on the suggestion and sue over the remarks is a separate question, of course.
But the point is, Democrats under the leadership of Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have spent three years dragging American politics into the gutter because of the panic Trump has induced among the Democratic-media establishment that he is, in fact, working to drain the swamp of a morally corrupt Washington.
They’ve attacked Trump at every stage, used almost unbelievably brutal tactics on appointees like Kavanaugh and gotten away with it because of a simpering mainstream media that was content when it played the role of lapdog to the Obama White House and has been snapping ever since Trump’s 2016 election victory upended the cozy relationship between the government and media powers in the nation’s capital.
But with Tuesday’s “scurrilous” attack — one by all appearances made up out of whole cloth — Chuck Schumer might have finally gone too far.
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