“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” That’s Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, and Joe Biden probably wishes that sentence wasn’t there because what he is alleged to have done is an impeachable offense.

Thanks to the tenacity of congressional Republicans — specifically Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley — the public can now read a very intriguing FBI FD-1023, a form used to collect raw intelligence from trusted confidential human sources (CHS) in need of verification. The form contains allegations that then-Vice President Joe Biden and family may have received a $10 million bribe from energy giant Burisma, where Hunter Biden served on the board, in exchange for pressuring then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the energy company.

According to the FBI document, a company source said, “It costs 5 (million) to pay one Biden, and 5 (million) to another Biden.” It’s unclear if the money had been dispersed, but if it was, it was perhaps funneled through those Biden shell companies.

In the document, a Burisma executive explains that Hunter, who “was stupid” and had no relevant experience, only held that position “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.” Gee, ya don’t say. In fact, both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden (the “smartest guy” Joe knows) made it clear to Burisma that this was why the energy company should hire the VP’s son.

Mykola Zlochevsky, a Ukrainian oligarch and founder and CEO of Burisma, claimed he was “pushed to pay” the Bidens, and he has “many text messages and ‘recordings,’” including two of Joe Biden, “that show he was coerced to make such payments” However, because Joe was personally involved in Shokin’s firing, “nobody would find out about [Zlochevsky’s] financial dealings with the Bidens.”

Oops.

Not surprisingly, the same FBI that killed the Hunter Biden laptop story despite knowing it was legitimate has been hiding this Burisma document from investigators for quite some time. For example, said Congressman James Comer, “The IRS team responsible for the Biden criminal investigation NEVER received the unclassified FBI FD-1023 form that alleged a Burisma executive bribed then-VP Biden for $5 million.” Remember, the IRS whistleblowers just testified Wednesday regarding the very relevant case of Hunter’s taxes.

“In the FBI’s record,” Comer added, “the Burisma executive claims that he didn’t pay the ‘big guy’ directly but that he used several bank accounts to conceal the money. That sounds an awful lot like how the Bidens conduct business: using multiple bank accounts to hide the source and total amount of the money.”

We’ve been sounding the alarm on this — repeatedly — for years.

This isn’t a Republican conspiracy, though the same Democrats who spent four years chasing the Russian collusion rabbit down a hole hilariously insist the FBI form contains “unverified” and “secondhand” allegations. Well, here’s Joe Biden bragging in 2018 about how he got the prosecutor fired by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid from Ukraine:

“I looked at [the Ukrainian leaders] and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a b**ch — he got fired.”

Democrats were so outraged about this quid quo pro that they impeached … Donald Trump for that famous phone call in which he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to find some evidence of Biden’s corruption. Put another way, they impeached Trump for what Biden actually did — for what he admitted doing and, it seems, got paid a lot of money to do.

You might think this would be big news for the newspaper that broke the Watergate story, then one of the biggest corruption scandals in U.S. history. If you do think that, you’d be wrong.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness” became The Washington Post’s first-ever slogan a couple of weeks after Donald Trump took office in 2017. It seems that isn’t so much a defiant motto in defense of democracy as it is a promise to kill it. Such is plainly the case when it comes to protecting Joe Biden from impeachment over his personal involvement in an alleged criminal bribery scheme.

A search of the paper’s website for the keyword “Burisma” says the most recent result is from May … of 2022. That single story is preceded by a small handful from 2020, including one “news analysis” piece making sure we all know Burisma is nothing more than a Trump distraction from his own troubles, and another one that “ruled out involvement by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden or his son, Hunter.”

Since that supposed authoritative debunking, the Post has said virtually zip about Burisma.

That silence includes nothing on the Post’s home page or archives today after yesterday’s bombshell. The Post is hardly alone, of course, as numerous outlets went to great lengths over the years to discredit or suppress any story hinting that Hunter Biden’s corruption is really Joe Biden’s corruption.

As observer David Burge one joked: “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”

Don’t the American people deserve to know if their current president accepted bribes while he was vice president? Bribes from a notoriously corrupt country that he is now going to great lengths to support?

Well, sometimes democracy dies in darkness.