Ukraine inquiry changing 2020 race
Trump campaign faces Biden probe controversy
DES MOINES, IOWA >> President Donald Trump, under growing pressure Saturday over his private conversations with Ukraine’s president, lashed out at former Vice President Joe Biden in an attempt to shift the focus of intensifying questions about whether Trump sought help from Ukraine to hurt Biden’s 2020 bid against him.
With Trump seizing on a familiar defense, saying Democrats were undertaking a “witch hunt” against him on Ukraine, Biden called on the House of Representatives to begin a new investigation of whether the president sought the interference of a foreign government to help bolster his reelec
tion campaign.
“This appears to be an overwhelming abuse of power,” Biden said during a campaign swing in Iowa. “We have never seen anything like this from any president.”
The sharp accusations between Trump and Biden, who leads the field for the Democratic presidential nomination, elevated the president’s dealings with Ukraine — and the secret complaint by a whistleblower in the intelligence community against Trump — as potentially significant new issues in the presidential race.
The controversy has focused on whether Trump abused his power by trying to get foreign actors to look into a possible political foe at home. But Trump also is trying to deflect attention and refocus it on the past financial dealings abroad of Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, at a time when a new brand of anti-washington populism is ascendant in both political parties.
As reports that Trump sought help from the Ukrainian government shake the country, Biden and other leading Democrats struggled with the realization that next year’s election could be an even more bitter version of their last presidential contest.
Trump on Saturday dismissed news reports that he urged the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden’s son, and he defended his own conduct as “perfectly fine” and routine.
“Now that the Democrats and the Fake News Media have gone ‘bust’ on every other of their Witch Hunt schemes, they are trying to start one just as ridiculous as the others, call it Ukraine Witch Hunt,” Trump wrote on Twitter. He said that any effort to investigate him would fail, comparing it to the investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, into his ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign.
The news reports he was referring to have revealed the existence of a secret whistleblower complaint that is believed to have been filed, at least in part, in response to Trump’s dealings with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The New York Times reported Friday that Trump, in a July call, pressed the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden’s son, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
On Saturday, Trump, intensifying a line of attack he and his allies have stoked for months, said the real problem was Biden and questions about what the president described as “the Joe Biden demand that the Ukrainian Government fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son.” Trump, referring to his conversation with Zelenskiy, said: “Nothing was said that was in any way wrong, but Biden’s demand, on the other hand, was a complete and total disaster.”
No evidence has surfaced to bolster Trump’s claim that the former vice president intentionally tried to help his son by pressing for the prosecutor general’s dismissal.
The issue strikes a particular nerve for Biden, who has long feared putting his family under the harsh spotlight of a presidential campaign. During a two-minute encounter with reporters on Saturday morning, he grew irate, angrily insisting that he had never spoken with his son about any overseas work and assailing Trump for an “overwhelming abuse of power.”
“You should be looking at Trump,” Biden said. “Trump is doing this because he knows I’ll beat him like a drum.”
Though he has yet to call for impeachment proceedings against Trump to begin — as have several of his rivals for the 2020 Democratic nomination — Biden on Saturday tiptoed closer to embracing the idea that has been steadily gaining support on Capitol Hill despite opposition from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The revelations offered voters a preview of what is likely to be an extraordinary general election contest if Biden were to win the nomination, one in which attacks by Trump and his team could boomerang, transforming Biden into a sympathetic figure under attack with foreign help.
It could just as easily mark a defining moment for Biden, a politician first elected to the Senate in 1972 and long accustomed to playing by the more genteel political rules of a different era.
While the new report gives Biden the one-on-one showdown with Trump that his campaign has spent months trying to create, it also exposes him and his son to yet another round of probing questions about the younger Biden’s moneymaking activities in Ukraine.
The Biden campaign moved quickly to browbeat the media over the story, underscoring a deep concern about how allegations about the younger Biden’s work will be received by voters.
“Any article, segment analysis and commentary that does not demonstrably state at the outset that there is no factual basis for Trump’s claim, and in fact that they are wholly discredited, is misleading reading and viewers,” deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said in an email to reporters.
But Biden advisers also seized on the furor to portray Trump as fixated on, and worried about, a potential general election race against Biden.
“There is only one candidate the president is trying to get foreign governments to dig up bogus dirt on,” said Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Biden.
Even as they avoided mentioning Biden, other Democratic presidential candidates moved quickly to capitalize on the new dynamic in the race. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who rarely mentions Trump in her stump speech, opened her remarks at a cattle call Saturday afternoon by excoriating both the president and Congress members.
“He has solicited another foreign government to attack our election system,” she told a crowd of 1,200 cheering Democratic voters gathered in Des Moines for an afternoon of primary speeches. “It is time to call out this illegal behavior and start impeachment proceedings right now.”
Biden, whose appearances on the campaign trail can be halting and sprinkled with misstatements, has generally delivered his strongest performances when focused on Trump.
Speaking about Trump allows Biden to discuss foreign policy and national security, issues that his campaign has said differentiate Biden, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, from the rest of the 2020 Democratic field.