BATTENFELD: UKRAINE CALL A REAL BAD LOOK FOR BIDEN
Biden’s chat with ex-leader proves ‘quid pro quo’ deal
The Ukraine is back in the 2020 election landscape, only this time it’s not a phone call from President Trump — it’s one from Joe Biden.
A newly released tape of a phone call between then Vice President Biden and former Ukranian leader Petro Poroshenko has Biden appearing to release $1 billion in aid in exchange for the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma and the vice president’s son Hunter Biden.
Biden tells Poroshenko at one point that “it’s going to be critical” for the new Ukraine prosecutor to “repair the damage that Shokin (the former prosecutor) did,” according to the call.
“And I’m a man of my word,” Biden says. “And now that the new prosecutor is in place we’re ready to move forward to signing that new $1 billion loan guarantee.”
Biden never mentions Burisma or his son Hunter in any of the tape recordings, released by a shady Ukrainian politician who has ties to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
But the recordings prove what Trump supporters and conservatives have been hammering Biden on — an apparent “quid pro quo” deal to get rid of Ukraine’s top prosecutor.
Biden has strongly denied that he pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor because of the Hunter Biden Burisma investigation. And the Biden campaign went into immediate damage control after the release of the calls.
“They heavily edited this, and it’s still a nothingburger that landed with a thud,” Biden spokesman Andrew Bates told the Washington Post.
This is a favorite tactic of Democrats and others — to downplay something by calling it a “nothingburger.”
It usually means they have something to hide.
Democrats have been trying to portray the quid pro quo as just yet another “conspiracy theory” put forward by conservatives to taint Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
It’s true that the new recordings don’t shed much new light on the Biden pressure campaign — except to confirm what we already know.
But it’s unclear if there are more recordings out there that could be more damaging to Biden.
The former VP has said that the Trump campaign is simply trying to distract attention from its poor performance handling the coronavirus pandemic.
But he can’t seem to get out of his basement to make his arguments.
At the same time, it’s highly unlikely that anyone in the mainstream media will be asking about the new Poroshenko tapes, so maybe the basement is the best place for Biden right now.