Hunter Biden may leave a bigger stamp on US politics than Joe

Jon Healey, Tribune News Service

It’s all Hunter Biden’s fault. And by all, I mean everything. Just imagine how the last few months would have played out had Biden not taken a seat on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, was leading the Obama administration’s push for a less corrupt government in Ukraine. Look at each key event in the process that led to President Trump’s impeachment in the House and likely acquittal in the Senate.

By the fall of 2015, a number of US and European officials were calling for Ukraine to remove its top prosecutor, Victor Shokin, because he was not pursuing corruption cases aggressively enough. The complaints included Shokin’s handling of the allegations against Burisma and the Ukrainian oligarch who founded it, Mykola Zlochevsky.

That pressure campaign intensified in early 2016, culminating when Joe Biden — per US policy, with Congress in the loop — insisted that Shokin be fired if Ukraine wanted to receive $1 billion in US loan guarantees. (The International Monetary Fund was also pushing for a more aggressive anti-corruption effort.) The Ukrainian government eventually complied.

End of story, right? Nothing to see here.

For his part, Trump may still have done some bizarre things with Ukraine policy. After all, his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had been forced to resign under a cloud because of his dealings in that country — the New York Times triggered his departure by reporting that Ukraine had found evidence that Manafort had received millions of dollars in off-the-books payments from a pro-Russian political party there.

As Reuters’ Andy Sullivan lays out here, Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and other supporters of the president viewed Manafort’s downfall as the work of Ukrainians trying to meddle in the US election. So there’s a good chance Trump, bitter that his 2016 victory was stigmatised by Russia’s interference on his behalf, would have pressured the new Ukrainian administration to pursue his bizarre and nonsensical theory about Ukrainians hacking the Democratic National Committee server or his belief that Ukrainian government officials improperly aided Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Trump may even have gone so far as to withhold the aid to Ukraine that Congress approved, in violation of the Impoundment Control Act. And that might even have led to a tell-all book by an irritated John Bolton after he was fired as Trump’s national security advisor.

But violating the ICA is hardly earth-shattering. What kicked things into impeachment territory was Trump’s call for an investigation of Biden. And even someone as credulous and factual-gravity-defying as Trump wouldn’t have demanded an investigation of Biden if there had been no conflict-of-interest hook to hang it on.

Enter Hunter Biden, who made the jaw-droppingly stupid decision to accept a post on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company founded and tainted by an oligarch widely labeled as corrupt, while his father was the leading Obama administration point person on Ukraine. Even if Hunter Biden’s sole interest had been to help Burisma adopt better governance practices and mend its ways — I’m offering that just for the sake of argument, not because there’s any evidence to support that idea — he should have known better than to lend his name to a company under investigation for money laundering.

That decision allowed Giuliani and his Ukrainian sources to cast Joe Biden’s actions in a sinister light, despite the overwhelming evidence that the elder Biden was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing.

That set the stage for Trump to ask a vulnerable foreign leader to investigate one of the president’s top political rivals. This request triggered enough concern among people listening in on the call that it prompted a whistleblower complaint, resulting eventually in Trump’s impeachment in the House for abuse of power and obstructing Congress.