Investigation of Biden comes up zero
Election years are often hung with the weight of investigations. The Nov. 3 event is no exception.
Senate Republicans dreamed up corruption allegations against Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter, involving Ukraine.
The result: No evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by the former vice president, closing out an inquiry the GOP leaders had hoped would tarnish the Democratic presidential nominee.
The innocuous findings included the fact that Hunter Biden had “cashed in” on his father’s name to close lucrative business deals around the world.
It also concluded that his work for Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company then mired in a corruption scandal while the former vice president was directing American policy toward Kyiv had given the appearance of a conflict of interest and alarmed some State Department officials.
On Wednesday, the Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees released an 87-page report summing up the findings. It contained no evidence that the elder Biden improperly manipulated American policy toward Ukraine or committed any other misdeed. In fact, investigators heard witness testimony that rebutted those charges.
The homeland security panel’s Republican chairman, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, bragged about his political ambitions for the report, boasting for weeks, that his findings would demonstrate Biden’s “unfitness for office.”
Instead, the result appeared to be little more than a rehashing six weeks before Election Day of unproven allegations that echo an active Russian disinformation campaign that rebutted those charges.
In the days before its release, Johnson conceded in an interview that there would be no “massive smoking guns,” saying that there was “a misconception on the part of the public that there would be.”
The Trump campaign promoted “explosive new revelations,” zeroing in on financial records obtained by the senators in China, Russia and elsewhere.
Records showed that Hunter received large sums of money – sometimes as large as seven figures — from foreigners.
They amounted to “stunning levels of corruption and breathtaking breaches of America’s national security,” Tim Murtaugh, a campaign spokesman, said.
In their own competing document challenging the report, Democrats accused Republicans of cherry-picking their findings. All 10 witnesses interviewed by investigators, they noted, had testified that neither Biden nor anyone else had altered American policy because of his son.
The lack of meaningful new information and the overlap with the Russian disinformation campaign that American intelligence officials have said is designed to denigrate Biden only fed charges by Democrats and Biden’s campaign that Johnson had abused his Senate power to aid Trump’s re-election campaign — and in so doing, had aided Moscow.