The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
More on latest Biden- Ukraine story
WASHINGTON— Looking to undermine rival Joe Biden 20 days before the election, President Donald Trump’s campaign is highlighting an article in the New York Post that offers twists to a familiar line of attack: Biden’s relationship with Ukraine. But the Post story raises more questions than answers, including about the authenticity of an email at the center of the story. The origins of the story trace back to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has repeatedly 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 actions were influenced by his son’s business dealings in Ukraine.
How did Bid en’ 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 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 Bur is ma from investigation. Bid en did indeed 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 story say?
The main email highlighted by the Post is an April 2015 message that it said was sent to Hunter Biden by Vady m Poz harskyi, an adviser to Burisma’s board. In it, he thanks the younger Biden “for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent ( sic) some time together. It’s realty ( sic) an honor and pleasure.”
Thewording 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 as described by the newspaper took place.
How did the Post obtain the emails?
The Post says it received a copy of a hard drive containing the messages on Sunday from Giuliani, who has pushed the unfounded idea that Ukraine was trying to interfere with the 2016 election and that the younger Bidenmay have enriched himself by selling his access to his father.
The Post says the emails were part of a trove of data recovered froma laptop that was dropped off at a computer repair shop in Delaware in April 2019. It says the customer, whom the owner could not definitively identify asHunter Biden, never paid for the service or retrieved it, and says the ownermade a copy of the hard drive that
he provided to Giuliani’s lawyer.
The owner of the Wilmington shop declined to comment Wednesday to The Associated Press, saying he didn’t feel like talking. The newspaper 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.
Are the emails authentic?
The actual origins of the emails are unclear. And disinformation experts say there aremultiple red flags that raisedoubts 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.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer, GeorgeMesires, said in a statement that “we have no idea where this came from, and certainly cannot credit anything that RudyGiuliani provided to the NY Post.”
Another potential concern is the involvement of another Trump associate, Steve Bannon, who the Post says first alerted it to the existence of the hard drive andwho along with Giuliani has been active 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 has repeatedly insisted that 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.
“I was with the vice president in all of his meetings on Ukraine,” said Michael Carpenter, Biden’s foreign policy adviser in 2015. “He never met with this guy. In fact, I had never heard of this guy until the New York Post story broke.”
If Biden did meet with Pozharskyi, he was not the only U.S. official whom ay have done so. 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.
How did social media companies respond to the story?
Companies like Twitter and Facebook, already under pressure to police their platforms ahead of the election, quickly flagged the article and moved to restrict its accessibility online.
The companies’ actions immediately provoked strong reactions from Republicans that the social media plat forms were censoring them, an outcry that grew louder later on Wednesday when the Trump campaign said the personal account of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany had been locked because she had posted the New York Post story.
Republican lawmakers announced plans to subpoena Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey, who acknowledged that the company should have provided more context and information about its actions.
What did the candidates say?
At a campaign rally in Iowa on Wednesday night, Trump spoke about the Post story and called Biden “a corrupt politician who shouldn’t even be allowed to run for the presidency.”
Biden’s campaign, meanwhile, pointed to the recentRepublican- led Senate investigation that found no evidence of wrongdoing on Biden’s part with regard to Ukraine. It also pointedly noted the involvement of Giuliani, saying his “discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported.”