Alook at the dubious background of Biden-Ukraine story
WASHINGTON — Looking to undermine rival Joe Biden 20 days before the election, President Donald Trump’s campaign has seized on a tabloid story offering bizarre twists to a familiar line of attack: Biden’s relationship with Ukraine.
However, the story in the New York Post raises more questions than answers, including about the authenticity of an email at the center of the story.
The origins of the story also trace back to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who repeatedly has pushed unfounded claims about Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
Even if the emails in the Post are legitimate, they don’t validate Trump and Giuliani’s claims that Biden’s actionswere influenced by his son’s business dealings.
A look at the development:
How did Biden’s son become a campaign issue?
Hunter Biden joined the board
of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2014, around the time his father, then the U.S. vice president, was helping conduct the Obama administration’s foreign policy with Ukraine.
Senate Republicans said in a recent report that the appointment may have posed a conflict of interest, but they did not present evidence that the hiring influenced U.S. policies.
Trump and his supporters, meanwhile, have advanced a widely discredited theory that Biden pushed for the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor to protect his son and Burisma from investigation.
The vice president indeed did press for the prosecutor’s firing, but that’s because he was reflecting the official position of not only the Obama administration but many Western countries and because the prosecutor was perceived as soft on corruption.
What does the New York Post report say?
The main email highlighted by the Post is aMay 2015message that it saidwas sent to Hunter Biden by Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to Burisma’s board.
In it, he thanks the younger Biden “for inviting me to DC and giving anopportunity tomeetyour father and spent (sic) some time together. It’s realty (sic) an honor and pleasure.”
The wording makes it unclear if he actually met Joe Biden. The Biden campaign said in a statement that it had reviewed Biden’s schedules from the time and that no meeting took place.
How did the Post obtain the emails?
The Post says it received a hard drive containing the messages on Sunday from Giuliani.
The Post says the emails were part of a trove of data recovered froma laptop thatwas dropped off at a computer repair shop in Delaware in April 2019.
The newspaper says the customer, whom the owner could not definitively identify as Hunter Biden, never paid for the service or retrieved it, and says the owner made a copy of the hard drive that he provided to Giuliani’s lawyer.
The Post says the owner alerted the FBI to the computer and hard drive, and that agents took possession of them.
That could not immediately be confirmed, and the FBI declined to comment Wednesday.
Are the new emails authentic?
The actual origins of the emails are unclear. And disinformation experts say there are multiple red flags that raise doubts about their authenticity, including questions about whether the laptop actually belongs to Hunter Biden, said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the nonpartisan Wilson Center in Washington.
Another potential alarm is the involvement of another Trump associate, Steve Bannon, who the Post says first alerted it to the emails and who, along with Giuliani, hasbeenactive in promoting an anti-Biden narrative on Ukraine.
“We should view it as a Trump campaign product,” Jankowicz said.
If authentic, are these emails damaging to Biden?
The suggestion that Joe Biden might have met with a Burisma representative is consequential, because he repeatedly has insisted he never discussed his son’s business with him.
But the emails provide no details on whether Pozharskyi and Biden actually met and, if so, what they discussed.
Pozharskyi was part of a Burisma delegation that lobbied congressional officials in 2014 in an attempt to show that the firm was not a corruption risk.