President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign has run menacing and misleading ads this fall accusing Joe Biden of corrupt dealings with Ukraine. Republicans in Congress are scrutinizing Biden’s son, pressing the State and Treasury departments for information about his work for a Ukrainian energy company. The president himself has unleashed a stream of unfounded accusations against the Bidens and pushed for them to appear at a potential impeachment trial in the Senate.
As Trump faces impeachment for allegedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden, he and his allies are now turning those same claims about Biden and his son into a key element of their defense. And they plan to continue to hammer at the Bidens’ Ukraine dealings as impeachment proceedings move into the new year.
There is no evidence that the elder Biden, while serving as vice president, improperly intervened in Ukraine to benefit his son. But the president’s advisers are betting that many voters will ignore the complexities of the allegations and absorb a simple message about a father using his influence to help his son, a senior Trump campaign official said.
The barrage of attacks is the latest example of Trump’s monthslong fixation with Biden, who leads the Democratic field in national polling and has bested the president in head-to-head surveys in several key battleground states. Biden and many independent experts have called the allegations of corruption false and Biden’s campaign insists that they demonstrate how worried the president is about facing him in a general election.
But the prospect of a public airing of the White House’s corruption claims lasting into the primary season worries some Democrats, who see a parallel to Republican efforts to tarnish Hillary Clinton over her email practices in the run-up to the 2016 election. That campaign, they say, proved how damaging a constant stream of insinuations and accusations from Trump and his allies can be.
“The tactic is very similar,” said Karen Finney, a Democratic consultant and former Clinton campaign senior spokeswoman. “Republicans were doing all they could to amp up the questions about her emails. They didn’t necessarily argue the facts. All they had to do was throw in the question to raise doubts.’’
Some voters at Biden’s campaign stops in recent weeks were keenly aware of that history.
Kristin Tracy, 50, who attended an event with Biden in Des Moines, Iowa, said that “there must be something to Joe that’s scaring the president, the current president, or he wouldn’t be trying to drum up those investigations against him with the Ukrainians.”
Still, she allowed, the scrutiny of Biden made her nervous.
“It obviously worked against Hillary Clinton,” she said of Trump’s attacks. “There’s a lot of people that don’t know, believe in blind faith what’s said on Fox or out of the president’s mouth.”
Hunter Biden did hold a lucrative position on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while his father was vice president, and while there is no evidence of wrongdoing, the arrangement struck some Obama administration officials as unseemly given the elder Biden’s role in Ukraine policy.
Now, some Democrats worry that a continued spotlight on Biden’s family will expose the former vice president’s vulnerabilities against a president who relishes getting personal. On Thursday in Iowa, Biden engaged in an angry exchange with a voter who falsely accused Biden of having “sent” his son to work in Ukraine, and of “selling access to the president.”
“You’re a damn liar, man,” Biden said.
The moment showed Biden being forceful, at a time when some Democrats want him to more vigorously defend himself. But it was also an emotional and heated reaction to a predictable issue that Trump would be sure to press in a general election.
The Trump campaign is divided over whether Biden will emerge as the nominee, the senior Trump campaign official said. Some remain convinced that Sen. Elizabeth Warren will emerge as the standard-bearer. But others have noted that Biden hasn’t collapsed despite months of scrutiny and a series of missteps, and see the entry of Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire who has already spent at least $50 million on television advertising since getting in the race less than two weeks ago, as representing the kind of chaos that will hurt lower-polling candidates, and not Biden.
The campaign believes its message about Ukrainian corruption will help them even if Biden is not the nominee — that it can be used to associate Democrats with a status quo that Trump ran against in 2016 and is hoping to again.
Still, many Democrats say that Biden is better equipped to respond to Trump and congressional Republicans this cycle than the Democrats were in 2016.
Trump is on the defensive himself, facing damaging revelations from the impeachment proceedings. Finney and other veterans of Clinton’s campaign also noted that the news media routinely describes many Republican claims about the Bidens as baseless, a difference from the tone of the coverage about Clinton’s emails in 2016 that has, so far, been helpful for Biden.
And Biden, a longtime Delaware senator who had extensive bipartisan relationships on Capitol Hill, simply does not have the same baggage with congressional Republicans that Clinton did dating to her time as first lady, some Democrats say.
“Joe is not Hillary, and Hunter is not the candidate,” said former Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who is supporting Biden. He suggested the difference in dynamics between Biden and Clinton was also partly due to sexism.
Republicans plan to keep pressing for Biden to be called to testify, both to highlight the issue of Hunter Biden’s consulting work and to suggest that Biden is being protected by Democrats in Washington.
Asked whether he would appear voluntarily at a trial, Biden told reporters Wednesday: “No, I’m not going to let them take their eye off the ball. The president is the one who has committed impeachable crimes, and I’m not going to let him divert from that.”
The president’s allies, in the meantime, have made clear they intend to make the Bidens the story. Sen. Lindsey Graham’s request to the State Department seeks to uncover new information about the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine. Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have pressed for documents from the Treasury Department seeking evidence of money laundering or fraud related to Hunter Biden’s business payments.
Spokesmen for Graham, Grassley and Johnson did not grant interview requests.
“The Bidens are in the middle of this,” said David Winston, a veteran GOP pollster who works with congressional Republicans. “No matter which side you’re looking at it from.”
Biden, his advisers and his allies are making the case that Trump is attacking the former vice president because he fears him as a potential opponent. The very fact that Trump pressed the president of Ukraine to investigate the Bidens proves that point, they say.
“I might say this is the only thing that Donald Trump and I agree on is the one he’s most concerned about,” said former Gov. Tom Vilsack, D-Iowa, who traveled with Biden on a weekend swing across the state.
Biden has turned the issue into one of his most reliable applause lines on the campaign trail — “Donald Trump doesn’t want me to be the nominee”— and his campaign is eager for Biden to use Trump as a foil at every turn.
Biden’s campaign also argues that Republican concerns about the Bidens’ records in Ukraine didn’t surface until politically convenient.
“Republicans controlled both chambers for years after all of this became public and didn’t say one word about it until Trump was exposed trying to blackmail Ukraine into bailing out his reelection campaign,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the campaign.
Those dynamics weren’t enough to reassure Tom McGrane, 69, as he waited to see Biden at a campaign event in rural Denison, Iowa, last weekend. He said the Republican approach to Biden reminded him of another historical parallel: the 2004 presidential election, when the organization Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacked John Kerry’s military record.
“As long as Republicans keep hammering on it, I think he needs to stop thinking it’s just all going to go away,” said McGrane, who said Biden should spend more time denouncing the Republicans’ actions against him.
McGrane told Biden just that after a speech here.
“He said he understands it completely,” McGrane recalled afterward. Kerry endorsed Biden on Thursday.
Speaking to reporters recently, Biden briefly appeared to acknowledge the risk at hand, as he referenced a television interview Hunter Biden did earlier this fall.
“He said, although he didn’t do anything wrong, he wishes he hadn’t had bad judgment because it allowed folks like Trump to try to change the focus,” Biden said.
He soon pivoted, saying, “This is about Donald Trump and his corrupt behavior.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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