Quid Pro Joe's troops are getting nervous.Joe Biden’s campaign knows that he’s going to be a casualty of this impeachment, and that’s why it sent out a warning to the national media, effectively telling reporters to be sure to clear him of any wrongdoing.
The former vice president’s campaign published a memo Monday telling the media that any reporting they do on the impeachment as it relates to Biden should be sure to state unequivocally that neither he nor his son Hunter did anything wrong.
“It is not sufficient to say the allegations [against the Bidens] are ‘unsubstantiated’ or that ‘no evidence has emerged to support them,’” the memo said. “Not only is there ‘no evidence' for Republicans’ main argument against the vice president — there is a mountain of evidence that actively debunks it. And it is malpractice to ignore that truth.”
This is awfully defensive for a campaign that insists its candidate did nothing wrong. And the impeachment isn’t centered on the question of whether Biden or his son did do something wrong. It’s centered on President Trump’s belief that either one or both of them may have, and maybe Ukraine’s government could have shed some light on the answer.
Yes, it would have hurt Biden politically to have Ukraine announce that it was looking into whether he or his son Hunter, or both, did anything corrupt during Hunter’s time on the board of a Ukrainian gas company (performing a lucrative and unexplained role). And yet that doesn’t make Biden exempt from questions about his record in office or about whether his son was using his father’s White House connection for profit (he likely was).
The Biden campaign memo asserts over and over again that the matter involving the candidate, his son, Ukraine, and the energy company Burisma has been put to rest and that no wrongdoing has ever been found.
By whom? Well, by the news media, of course!
Oh, please. The only national news publication to have investigated Hunter Biden and Burisma is the Washington Post, and that paper came up with more questions than it did answers.
From that September 2019 report: “What specific duties Hunter Biden carried out for Burisma are not fully known. A lawyer for Hunter Biden, George R. Mesires, declined to say how much his client earned, or whether the vice president’s son knew the company’s owner was in the crosshairs of authorities when he joined.“Furthermore, George Kent, a U.S. diplomat who oversaw Ukrainian affairs during Biden's tenure as vice president, testified in October that in 2015, he had told Biden's office at the time that there were concerns about Hunter and Burisma, only to be told in return that it wasn't important and that Biden didn't have the "bandwidth" to be troubled about it.
Trump asked Ukraine’s president to look into the issue and, according to Ambassador Gordon Sondland, he wanted an investigation announced in public. So what? Joe Biden himself has admitted he was uneasy about his son’s dealings with the Ukrainian gas company. Again, running for president doesn’t make the subject off limits to anyone, including Trump.
And, again, the impeachment didn’t start over accusations that the Bidens did anything wrong. It started over the concern that perhaps they did.
Here’s what Trump said, according to the White House transcript, in the phone call with the head of Ukraine last year, the conversation which is at the heart of the Democrats’ impeachment case: “There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it ... It sounds horrible to me.”
All of this will be brought up at the Senate trial this week, and despite what Biden’s campaign says, nothing about it is settled. But let’s see how dutifully the media follow the campaign’s orders.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/joe-biden-is-not-in-the-clear-on-impeachment-and-his-campaign-knows-it
