The growing scandal over President Trump’s phone call with
Ukrainian President Zelensky isn’t going away. New revelations are emerging at
a rapid clip and, while that isn’t good news for the president, at least for
the moment it seems to be good news for Joe Biden.
After months of gaffes and serving as a target for the other
Democratic candidates, Biden is currently enjoying a breather as his fellow
Democratic hopefuls focus on the news du jour of President Trump’s dealings
with Ukraine. Even though Biden is central to the Ukraine story, the attention
may help him more than it hurts him by drawing attention away from other Democrats.
"Every candidate wants to be attacked by the
president," Democratic strategist Ian Russell told Axios.
"You want this to be a 2-person race...If you're able to get a press cycle
or two of you going mano-a-mano against Trump, that's absolutely a good thing
for Biden."
The Real
Clear Politics average shows Biden ticking up markedly over the past week.
In the average of polls, Biden is now at 30 percent and holds a double-digit
lead over Elizabeth Warren, his nearest challenger.
Although President Trump is accusing Biden of corruption in
his own dealings with Ukraine during the Obama Administration, there is so far
no evidence of wrongdoing by the former vice president. Biden also stands to
gain if, after all of the accusations from Trump, nothing untoward is unearthed
about Biden’s actions. Trump’s accusations center on Biden’s efforts to fire the
top Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in 2016.
At the time, Biden’s son, Hunter, was a board member of
Burisma, an energy company founded by an ally of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Putin
dictator of Ukraine who was deposed in February 2014. Biden served on the board
from April
2014 through April 2019. Republicans say that Joe Biden intervened to
protect his son from investigation by Shokin, who had previously investigated Burisma’s
owner.
There are several problems with this theory, however. While Vice
President Biden’s did create the appearance of conflict-of-interest due to
Hunter’s business dealings, the Associated Press
points out that the idea to fire Shokin was not Biden’s and Ukraine has denied
that either Hunter Biden or Burisma were under investigation at the time of
Shokin’s dismissal. Further, the Obama
Administration and other Western governments, as well as the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund, wanted Shokin gone because he was considered too
soft on corruption, not because he was too tenacious.
Even before the current scandal erupted, the new Ukrainian prosecutor,
Yuriy Lutsenko, denied that the Bidens were under investigation or had
committed any crimes. Lutsenko told Bloomberg
in May that Shokin submitted his own resignation and that the Burisma
investigation was already dormant by the time he left.
“There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close
cases against [Burisma owner] Zlochevsky,” Vitaliy Kasko, a former official in
the prosecutor general’s office, told Bloomberg.
“It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.”
There are problems with the timeline as well. Joe Biden made
his trip to Ukraine in March 2016, but Shokin had resigned a month earlier in
February per the Kyiv
Post. Shokin seems to have resumed work at some point and was formally dismissed by the Ukrainian
parliament on March 29.
In other developments on the scandal, President Trump
admitted to withholding nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine shortly
before the president had his phone call with Ukrainian president Zelensky. The
White House said that the aid was delayed to concerns about corruption. The
money was ultimately released in mid-August.
Separately, Trump attorney Rudy
Giuliani claimed that he was asked by the State Department to make his own
trip to meet Ukrainian leaders. Giuliani met Andriy Yermak in Madrid
in August 2019 and urged him to investigate the Bidens. Giuliani also
claimed that a $3
million payment Hunter Biden received for serving on the board of Burisma
was “money laundering.”
Giuliani also told Fox
Business that “I can't tell you if it's 100%” that President Trump didn’t
threaten to cut off aid to Ukraine. He added “there’s no quid pro quo” that
would justify impeachment.
While the mounting scandal means that Joe Biden’s
relationship with Ukraine will be closely scrutinized, the former vice president
has so far benefitted from the attacks by the Trump Administration while Trump’s
reputation has been further sullied and impeachment
is once again on the table. It is far too early to tell whether either side
will score a knockout punch with new information that seems to be breaking almost
hourly. The one certainty is that the Ukraine scandal will not go away quickly
and both Trump and Biden are going to remain in the spotlight.
Originally published in The
Resurgent
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