The biggest cover-ups are usually the ones right in front of us — as they say, “hiding in plain sight.”

This whole impeachment-in-search-of-a-high-crime charade going on in the House of Representatives today has nothing to do with actually removing President Trump from office.

If that is all Democrats wanted to do, then they would just field a candidate against him whom voters find slightly less detestable than they found Hillary Clinton. That way, when they boot President Trump from office, they will have voters on their side. And Vice President Mike Pence won’t be left sitting in the Oval Office.

Anyway, they are presently running a hotly partisan and absurdly secret witch hunt that will only pants themselves in the U.S. Senate. (Spoiler Alert: Republicans control the U.S. Senate, where the Democrats’ hotly partisan and absurdly secret witch hunt will be dead on arrival.)

So, what is this all about? It is a cover-up, plain and simple.

Whom, you ask, are they trying to cover for? Their next political savior who can take down Mr. Trump?

Certainly not former Vice President Joseph R. Biden. If anything, Mr. Biden has been set ablaze atop the altar as a sacrifice in this massive international cover-up by Democrats.

The sleaze and dishonesty and self-dealing that oozes from the Biden name these days will leave a permanent stain on his nearly half-century political career.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” said Hunter “The Leech” Biden, when asked whether he could have gotten a job making $50,000 a month from a Ukrainian gas company if his last name hadn’t been “Biden” at a time when his daddy was vice president of the United States.

“Probably not, in retrospect,” The Leech allowed. “But that’s — you know — I don’t think that there’s been a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.”

Game. Set. Match.

That is all anybody needs to know about the Biden family and whether they were open for bribery in Ukraine or China or anywhere else in the world.

The key to understanding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s coup conspiracy against the president has nothing to do with Mr. Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine. Instead, it has everything to do with all the fake Russia nonsense they have been barking about for the past three years — but are suddenly very quiet about today.

When was the last time you heard any major Democratic persecutor in Congress utter the word “Russia”?

As Sherlock Holmes would say, it is the dog that DIDN’T bark. Which brings us to the “whom” that Democrats are sacrificing all in an effort to protect: former President Barack Obama.

Currently, there are a handful of very, very serious probes by nonpartisan prosecutors bound by rules of fairness and due process looking into the origins of the Obama administration’s spying operation on the campaign of a political opponent at the height of the 2016 election season.

This is and always has been the most gravely serious matter in the whole fake Russia “collusion” saga. People go to jail for doing things like this in America. And it’s not just former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper or ex-CIA Director John Brennan and dirty FBI agents like Peter Strzok who face devastating consequences if it can be proved they used their massive government powers in an effort to destroy a political opponent.

It could reach deep into the White House. It could reach the top.

This is why Mrs. Pelosi has dropped Russia and collusion and stopped talking about the Mueller report or all the fantasies laid out in the “dirty dossier” that Democrats paid foreign agents to dig up on Mr. Trump from Russian sources.

It is also why Mrs. Pelosi refuses to run the current impeachment “inquiry” with even a hint of due process or fairness. If the minority — or the executive branch — were afforded the fairness that attended past impeachments, Republicans would gain subpoena powers to call witnesses.

Do you think Republicans might like to question Mr. Brennan or Mr. Clapper under oath about who authorized espionage against political opponents during the height of a presidential campaign?

Of course they would. But Mrs. Pelosi will never let them get that close to Mr. Obama.

So … Ukraine! Joe Biden be damned.

⦁ Contact Charles Hurt at churt@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter @charleshurt.