Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign rally in Philadelphia, May 2019
Today’s pop quiz: Think of a U.S. leader whose son has traded on his father’s name and influence, in dubious or corrupt money-making schemes abroad. That would be Donald Trump, right? But it would also be Joe Biden. Thus the problem.
Trump epitomizes the corrupt use of office. Above all, in 2020 we need a Democrat who epitomizes ridding the presidency of corruption.
In 2016, Trump won in part because voters could conclude, thanks to Hillary Clinton’s immense Wall Street “speaking fees,” that neither party was serving the interests of regular Americans. They all seemed to be a bunch of scoundrels—the swamp.
Hunter Biden, Joe’s wayward son, was paid $50,000 a month for serving on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company whose boss, Mykola Zlochevsky, was under fire for possibly corrupt dealings. Zlochevsky’s strategy included creating a prestigious and well-connected international board. Before getting this gig, Hunter Biden had zero knowledge or experience in Ukraine.
Does any sentient person think he was hired for any reason other than the fact that he was the vice president’s son? If you or I offered to serve on the board of a Ukrainian company for $50,000, it would be a joke.
Then Joe Biden compounded the problem, as Obama’s point man on Ukraine, by pressing the government to fire the prosecutor who was going after Burisma, on whose board Hunter served. The story gets very muddy here, because the prosecutor very likely was corrupt, too, and there were good reasons to force him out.
But it sure looks like hell.
This past July, The New Yorker published the authoritative piece on Hunter Biden, with the prophetic title “Will Hunter Biden Jeopardize His Father’s Campaign?”
Here is a key paragraph:
Several former officials in the Obama Administration and at the State Department insisted that Hunter’s role at Burisma had no effect on his father’s policies in Ukraine, but said that, nevertheless, Hunter should not have taken the board seat. As the former senior White House aide put it, there was a perception that “Hunter was on the loose, potentially undermining his father’s message.” The same aide said that Hunter should have recognized that at least some of his foreign business partners were motivated to work with him because they wanted “to be able to say that they are affiliated with Biden.” A former business associate said, “The appearance of a conflict of interest is good enough, at this level of politics, to keep you from doing things like that.”
Trump, famously, does not read. But the details of the profile were featured on Fox News.
A few days later, in mid-July, Trump directed aides to withhold some $400 million in promised military aid from Ukraine and began his pressure on Ukraine’s president to investigate Biden and his son. These moves have drawn condemnation from even centrist Democrats with seats deep in Trumpland, and may finally push skittish House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over into the impeachment camp.
A full-blown impeachment investigation now seems inevitable. This is not good news for Donald Trump. But it is not good news for Joe Biden either.
In the coverage of the Ukraine affair, the spotlight has been on Trump’s behavior. But the logic of the story suggests that Biden will soon share that most unwelcome spotlight.
Trump’s corruption and abuse of office to enrich himself and his family dwarfs anything that Joe and Hunter Biden did. So does his corrupt use of the presidency to ensnare political opponents.
But since Trump’s defense will be that the twin efforts of Biden father and son legitimately deserved investigation, we will be hearing and reading a lot more about Hunter’s efforts to trade on his father’s name and position. And though it’s small beer compared to Trump’s grossly impeachable offenses, the Ukraine caper of the Bidens is far from pretty.
If Democrats call key Republicans and State Department officials to testify to Trump’s abuse of office to get a foreign leader to find dirt on a political opponent, Republicans will be quick to call Obama officials quoted in the New Yorker piece. And they will likely call Hunter himself—as well as his father Joe. Instead of being in the role of scourge, Biden will be in the dock.
None of this will be good for Biden’s campaign.
Biden’s effort has been to present himself as steady, reliable, representative of pre-Trump “normal,” and the Democrat most likely to beat Trump. But the kind of normal represented by Hunter’s effort to trade on his father’s position is the kind of normal that brought us Trump.
The last thing Biden needs is to have the public reminded of the Hunter mess and the fact that he didn’t interfere. Whether or not they explicitly discussed Ukraine—and the New Yorker piece reports that they did—there was the clear appearance of a conflict. No explicit quid pro quo was needed. Hunter shouldn’t have been there.
As often is the case, the details are very complex. But it’s too easy for voters to conclude, once again, that they’re all a bunch of scoundrels. And that’s not the way for Democrats to beat Trump.
Robert Kuttner's new book is The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy.
