President Trump’s reported pressure on Ukraine’s leader to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter stands to benefit the former vice president, forcing 2020 Democratic rivals to come to his defense and putting him at the center of the dominant political controversy of the moment.
Calls for impeachment of Trump over his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky come at a crucial time for Biden with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren emerging as his major threat.
Biden was Warren’s top target with Hunter Biden’s work for oligarch-owned energy company Burisma Holdings a potentially fruitful subject for attacks given her longstanding opposition to political corruption and lobbying. But now, Warren is in the uncomfortable position of having to defend Biden. In addition, the talk of impeachment put the focus on Trump rather than defeating Biden.
“After the Mueller report, Congress had a duty to begin impeachment,” Warren tweeted, referring to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. “By failing to act, Congress is complicit in Trump’s latest attempt to solicit foreign interference to aid him in US elections. Do your constitutional duty and impeach the president.”
Other mid-tier Biden rivals echoed that message, including Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. “We need a new commander in chief — and we need to absolutely begin impeachment proceedings. He’s gotta go,” Harris, the junior senator for California, wrote on Twitter. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg added, “This president’s actions are a betrayal of American democracy. We deserve better.”
While distracting his competitors, Trump’s actions simultaneously provided Biden with an opportunity to portray himself as a sympathetic figure and energized efforts to forcibly remove the sitting president from office.
“The political implications may be severe for Donald Trump,” Democratic strategist Peter Fenn told the Washington Examiner. “This may shift even more independent-minded voters toward Democrats and Joe Biden.” Fenn said the Ukraine episode “will also solidify the Democratic base to work hard, organize, and contribute to win in 2020.”
The Ukraine episode took off this week after months of Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani pushing Ukraine to investigate Biden, 76, for threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees during a 2016 trip to Kiev if Ukraine didn’t fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. The former New York City mayor says he is concerned about a potential conflict of interest given that Shokin, who himself was shrouded in a corruption-related controversy, was investigating Burisma, the natural gas firm where Hunter Biden, 49, was a board member.
But there are also perils for Biden.
Democratic consultant Tracy Sefl warned her party to ensure the focus remained on Trump rather than Biden. Trump, in 2016, said he only jokingly invited Russia to examine Hillary Clinton and “find the 30,000 emails” that were allegedly missing from her private server.
“Confusion perpetuates and voila, a new negative talking point against Biden is born. Democrats face the danger of allowing the shorthand of ‘Biden + Ukraine = something shady’ taking hold and Trump’s own admission to treasonous behavior fading away as yet another Trump scandal that went unpunished,” Sefl wrote in an email.
The Biden campaign has been trying to do just that. His advisers worked to counter the candidate’s initial defensive response to reporters in Iowa on Friday shortly after news of Trump’s conversations with Zelensky broke. The former vice president at first refused to comment on the matter other than to say Trump’s assertions lacked “credibility.”
In a much stronger statement that evening, he condemned Trump’s conduct for being “particularly abhorrent” because “it exploits the foreign policy of our country and undermines our national security for political purposes.”
Biden then scolded a journalist who grilled him on whether he had discussed Ukraine with his son, imploring him to ask the “right” question. The exchange was promoted on social media by the Biden campaign.
On Monday, the campaign attacked the press for having “allowed the most dishonest president in American history to function as their assignment editor and treated a roundly debunked conspiracy theory as valid and/or the source of open questions that do not exist.”
