Let’s go there! The Biden ‘scandal’ in Ukraine needs a full airing.
In an act of extreme political malpractice, leading Democrats are dismissing the idea of a “witness swap” in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. Such an agreement would allow Democrats to compel the testimony of former national security adviser John Bolton and other current and former White House insiders in exchange for allowing Republicans to call Joe Biden and his son Hunter to testify.
Minority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday that such a deal is “off the table.”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the lead impeachment manager, scoffed, “This isn’t like some fantasy football trade. … This isn’t we’ll offer you this, if you give us that.”
Biden himself rejected the suggestion, telling reporters, “We’re not going to turn (the trial) into a farce, into some kind of political theater.”
They point out, correctly, that whatever Joe Biden and his son did or didn’t do in Ukraine is irrelevant to whether Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine in an attempt to advance his political prospects and then obstructed justice when covering up the deed.
But they fail to see that the impeachment trial is, in fact, the ideal, high-profile venue for airing the Hunter Biden story and putting it behind them. It will otherwise remain a major distraction and source of voter concern as long as Joe Biden is in the race and seemingly reluctant to answer hard questions about it.
To suggest that Democrats are trying to run from the truth, Trump has tweeted “Where’s Hunter?” at Biden, a taunt echoed by Trump supporters who dog Biden on the campaign trail. Speaking at a Trump rally in Minneapolis last October, Eric Trump called Hunter Biden an embezzler and a crook. He then led the crowd in a chant of “lock him up!” echoing the similarly empty but doubtlessly effective cry of “lock her up!” that Trump supporters chanted about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Rather than simply allow the Republicans to subpoena the Bidens, the Democrats should insist on it, deal or no deal. At the very least it would reveal a consistent devotion to facts.
And the facts here are these:
In early 2014, a major Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma Holdings, recruited Hunter Biden to serve on its board of directors for a reported $50,000 a month. He was a Yale Law School graduate and former President George W. Bush appointee to the Amtrak board of directors who was ostensibly hired for his expertise in corporate governance. But, let’s be honest, it was his last name — his blood relation to the then sitting vice president of the United States — that inspired Burisma to bring him on.
I will pause here to allow you to get over your shock that the children of the famous and powerful cash in on their lineage and that corporations occasionally bedazzle their boards of directors with lightly qualified figureheads.
Recovered now? Good. Hunter’s appointment, in which his father played no role, was problematic because Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, where new leadership was attempting to investigate and root out rampant corruption. Among the allegations was that Burisma’s co-founder had abused his power as ecology minister under the previous government to get favorable treatment for the company.
Obama’s State Department acknowledged in news stories that Hunter Biden’s gig gave rise to an appearance of a conflict of interest for his father, but noted that
Hunter was a private citizen.
Why didn’t Joe Biden pull Hunter aside and say “Dude! Go get a real job! This may be legal, but it’s wildly inappropriate!”?
Good question. News stories, including a 10,000-word profile of Hunter Biden in the New Yorker last summer, suggest Joe went easy because Hunter was troubled. He had a long history of abuse and addiction that had culminated in his discharge from the naval reserves in February 2014, after he tested positive for cocaine use, and his brother, Beau, had been diagnosed in August 2013 with the brain cancer that would kill him less than two years later.
Hunter subsequently went through an ugly divorce and began dating his brother’s widow. It’s a disquieting, deeply personal story that some say took its first ghastly turn when Hunter’s mother and sister were killed in a car crash when he was 2.
And the story might still be of little general interest had not officials in the European Union and Washington agreed in early 2016 with anti-corruption activists in Ukraine that the country’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, was an obstacle to reform and had to be replaced.
Joe Biden was dispatched to Ukraine to secure Shokin’s ouster. He privately told then-President Petro Poroshenko that a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee was contingent on the removal of Shokin.
“Pressure on us came from everywhere,”
Poroshenko later told the Los Angeles Times. “The activists, political forces, embassies, international organizations” all demanded Shokin be fired, he said.
Hunter Biden and Burisma never came up in the conversations, Poroshenko told the paper. Perhaps because, by most accounts, his investigation into Burisma was long dormant, and it had never probed any alleged misdeeds that occurred while Hunter Biden was on its board.
Trump’s campaign and his most frantic defenders in the GOP continue to spin the tale that Joe Biden personally blackmailed Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was about to expose corrupt acts by Hunter Biden related to his job at Burisma, and this is what prompted Trump’s wholesome interest in investigating corruption in Ukraine. It’s a tale that doesn’t withstand even cursory scrutiny, but Joe Biden’s unwillingness to testify and the Democrats’ reluctance to engage only serves to amplify it.
Republicans ask, what are the Bidens hiding?
But the better question is, what are the Republicans hiding? They have the power right now to call Hunter and Joe to the well of the Senate and make them testify. They can do so while still denying the Democrats the right to call any witnesses against Trump.
Why won’t they do it? Because it would expose the empty dishonesty of their claims. And for Democrats not to take advantage of this moment when significant majorities of the public indicate they want to hear from witnesses is a potentially historic blunder.
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s reader poll to select the funniest tweet was, “It’s been six months since I joined the gym and no progress. I’m going there in person tomorrow to see what’s really going on,” by @_CakeBawse.
The poll appears at chicagotribune.com/ zorn, and you can receive an alert when it’s posted by signing up for the Change of Subject email newsletter at chicagotribune. com/newsletters.