The House impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden is "important work," as the American people need to get to the bottom of the evidence against him, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, said on Newsmax Thursday.
"The evidence that points towards influence peddling from President Biden when he was vice president is shocking and alarming," Burgum told Newsmax's "Newsline."
He added that "coming from my 30 years of experience in the private sector" before becoming governor, he knows that if a company's officer, chairman, CEO, or board member was "trying to benefit your own self, your own personal product, your own family with payments related to the brand of your company, you'd be tossed out."
"That'd be front page news in The Wall Street Journal and every other [publication] because it's absolutely illegal for someone to do that," Burgum continued. "We have to hold our public officials at least to the standards that we hold people to in the private sector. This is absurd."
Meanwhile, Burgum participated in Wednesday night's GOP debate, though former President Donald Trump was in Michigan, speaking with auto industry workers. Burgum said he agrees with Trump that Biden has not been "straightforward" with his actions affecting the industry.
"He goes and stands on the picket line and says, I'm with you, but it's actually his energy policies, the extreme left-wing environmental approach that they're taking, where they are trying to sell a story that somehow they're helping the environment by switching to EVs," said Burgum. "But this makes no sense. It doesn't make sense from a physics, from an economics, or a common-sense standpoint, because China is the largest polluter in the world."
And the strike is not only about pay, because the Biden administration is using taxpayer dollars to subsidize companies and workers making cars with electric engines, he said.
"A lot of those workers are building internal combustion cars," he said. "Their cars are not getting subsidized … when you subsidize vehicles, the price goes up but it doesn't make us more competitive. In this case, it doesn't make the environment cleaner. If you care about the environment, you'd want to have every ounce of energy produced in the United States."
But with the "political opportunism" coming as a result, "this strike lays at the feet of Joe Biden and his energy policies," said Burgum.
The governor also spoke out about New York Judge Arthur Engoron's ruling Tuesday that Trump and his family business fraudulently inflated the value of his properties and other assets.
"These things have to play out in court but certainly I understand there's wildly different estimates of what real estate can be worth," Burgum said. "We've got a problem in America if we've got a two-tier justice system, where they're using power and influence to attack political opponents."
Real estate valuation can also result in multiple valuations of a property's worth, said Burgum.
"You're going to get multiple answers and depending on who's paying for it, you're going to get a different answer," said Burgum. "If the court was paying for these, they're going to get low numbers, so it's not a surprise to me."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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