So much for that well worn chestnut that Hunter Biden "did nothing wrong," heard so very frequently during President Trump's impeachment hearings.

For an $83,000-a-month retainer from Burisma, the corrupt Ukrainian gas company (Betsy McCaughey says he ended up with a $1-million payday), young Hunter proved to be able and willing to make himself useful.

Look at this sequence of events that came about as a result of Hunter sitting on the Burisma board. According to National Review:

A consultant for Burisma with links to Hunter Biden approached a top State Department official in June 2016 to discuss "troubling events" in Ukraine, according to newly released State Department emails. Consultant Sally Painter of Blue Star Strategies was at the time working with Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company, to quash corruption investigations into the firm. Painter approached then-deputy secretary of state Tony Blinken at an event for the Truman National Security Project, and sent an email to Blinken's top aide three days later requesting a second meeting with the deputy secretary. "Per my conversation with Tony at the Truman event, [Painter's Blue Star partner] Karen Tramontano and I would like to have a brief coffee with Tony at his earliest convenience regarding some troubling events we are seeing n [sic] Ukraine," Painter wrote in a June 27, 2016 email first reported by the Daily Caller. The email shows an instance of Burisma's efforts to contact State Department officials at the same time it was being investigated for corruption. However, the email does not specify whether Painter discussed Burisma with Blinken. Other emails show that Tramontano had been in contact with the state department specifically regarding Burisma.

So the $83,000-a-month retainer paid for something, and these emails suggest that Burisma got its money's worth.

This would explain why Hunter got the board seat in the first place. A cashiered ex-Navy guy, he got into the Navy at all based only on the strings his dad, Vice President Joe Biden, pulled for him. After the booze and the strippers and the cocaine washed him out of the Navy, he somehow ended up in that Burisma board seat, zero energy experience, zero Ukraine experience, zero consulting experience, all for that princely $83,000-a-month paycheck.

With a story like this, now we know what he had to sell: a pay-to-play game that guaranteed access for any corrupt company that would put him on the payroll, goosing their access and influence to the State department and its policymakers. Hillary Clinton ran the State department on a pay-to-play basis, up until her departure in 2013, and apparently her successors were little different.

Here's McCaughey's sequence of events as a reminder of just how this all worked:

April 15, 2014: Burisma sends Hunter Biden's business partner, Devon Archer, $112,000. April 16, 2014: Archer visits Vice President Biden at the White House. April 21, 2014: Vice President Biden arrives in Ukraine bearing millions in aid for the Ukraine energy industry. May 12, 2014: Hunter Biden joins Burisma's board. February 2015: Ukrainian authorities seize the property of Burisma's CEO and go after unpaid taxes. March 2016: Biden demands that Ukraine's top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, be fired, and threatens to hold up $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees.

It signals that President Trump was right to withhold aid to Ukraine until this kind of behavior could be sorted out.

Democrats impeached him for that. This new information now shows that what they were really doing was covering up for a massive pattern of Democrat corruption.

Image credit: Ben Stanfield, via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.