Danielle McLaughlin

‘‘He has given us no choice,’’ Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, told the New Yorker. The fairly substantial straw that broke the impeachment camel’s back came this week with the revelation that the United States president had conducted a months-long campaign to have a foreign state investigate a domestic political rival.

In a stunning abuse of presidential power, Donald Trump held up crucial military funding to Ukraine at the same time that he was trying, on multiple fronts (including sending his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to meet with Ukrainian officials), to unearth damaging information on Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Republicans are playing an offensive defence. Their first line of attack is that Joe Biden did ‘‘the same thing’’ when, as vice-president, he allegedly intervened in the political affairs of Ukraine to protect his son – who sat on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma – from investigation.

Their second line of attack is that Hunter Biden had no business on that board, and that he was simply monetising his father’s office.

Was Hunter Biden exploiting the fact that his dad was vice-president? Republicans may have a point. According to Bloomberg, Hunter Biden earned more than US$1.35 million from Burisma between 2014 and 2015.

A lawyer by training, Hunter Biden was brought on to the board, alongside a number of other foreign nationals, ostensibly to help Burisma with ‘‘corporate best practices’’. He had earlier helped the company navigate multinational regulations. He was paid approximately US$79,000 a month.

But like Ivanka Trump’s Chinese trademarks (at least 21 of which were obtained since last November), or the Trump Organisation’s 2017 launch of the Trump Kolkata high-rise hotel in India, or Jared Kushner’s sister hawking US investment visas in China, it smacks of self-dealing. Of personal enrichment linked entirely to familial political power.

It is the rotten core of politics, and it should be called out, whoever is doing it and wherever it occurs (Republicans are notably silent on the Trump family’s many improper foreign business entanglements). The first line of attack, however, is harder to credit. In 2016, Joe Biden did threaten to withhold a US$1.6 billion loan guarantee from Ukraine unless thenprosecutor general Viktor Shokin was fired. Shokin had, for a time, been investigating the founder of Burisma.

This investigation commenced before Hunter Biden joined the Burisma board. Under Shokin’s leadership, many Ukrainian corruption probes had slowed to a crawl.

Calls for the prosecutor’s ouster came not only from the Ukrainian people but from the G7 and the International Monetary Fund, which threatened to withhold millions of dollars in aid. Shokin was fired not because he was investigating Burisma, but because he was not.

There is no evidence that Hunter Biden was involved in any corruption in Ukraine. But even if he and his father were up to their eyeballs in wrongdoing, it is still a gross abuse of power for a US president to use his private lawyer, and potentially US taxpayer money, to pressure a foreign state to get dirt on a political rival.

Trump tap-danced around Russia’s help in 2016, his campaign building an entire media strategy around the release of emails damaging to Hillary Clinton, which had been hacked by Russian state actors.

This time, he tried to slow-dance with Ukraine, soliciting electoral interference from a foreign state right out in the open.

As Giuliani told The New York Times in May, ‘‘This isn’t foreign policy – I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop,’’ adding that the information he sought would be ‘‘very, very helpful to my client’’.

Democrats, and Pelosi, have had enough. Pelosi held off for months on an impeachment inquiry in light of lukewarm public support. Even as Robert Mueller announced 10 potential acts of obstruction of justice that only Congress could adjudicate, as the president and his family enriched themselves with foreign and taxpayer money through their hotels and golf courses, and as the president hid – from Americans and his own advisers – conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But she finally acted this week because the latest outrage was one outrage too many, and to not begin an impeachment investigation would mean that, actually, nothing matters any more.

Worse, to not act would mean that the impeachment remedy built into the US Constitution – as divisive and bloody as it may be – is as good as dead.

It is not dead. And even if impeachment is political suicide for Democrats, they have done the right thing by holding power to account. And that is worth losing everything for.

Danielle McLaughlin is the Sunday Star-Times’ US correspondent. She is a lawyer, author, and political and legal commentator, appearing frequently on US and New Zealand TV and radio. She is also an ambassador for #ChampionWomen, which aims to encourage respectful, diverse, and thoughtful conversations. Follow Danielle on Twitter at @MsDMcLaughlin.