As Senate Republicans gear up the latest attacks on Joe Biden’s son, it’s an open question whether the former vice president will counter the offensive by raising ethical concerns about President Trump’s own children.
Highlighting alleged corruption by Hunter Biden will likely be one of Trump’s key strategies to winning his reelection. The president has and almost certainly will argue that Biden and his family benefited from “the swamp” and political connections, including his lucrative consulting work for the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma, despite lacking expertise in the subject.
The issue is more acute and urgent in light of Biden’s Tuesday sweep of major primary states, with his socialist rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders winning only North Dakota while leading in Washington state. After nearly running the table on Super Tuesday a week earlier, Biden is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
Aides close to Biden have long said that he wishes to avoid attacks on Trump’s family altogether, although pressure is building from his supporters to mount an offensive. On Wednesday, two Biden supporters, former “ethics czar” for President Barack Obama, Norm Eisen, and chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, Richard Painter, wrote an opinion article for the Washington Post calling for an investigation for the Trump family.
The pair noted Jared Kushner, the husband of Ivanka Trump and a senior adviser to the president, has drawn repeated criticism because a company he co-founded has received over $90 million in funding from foreign governments.
“The president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who as government officials are bound by federal ethics laws, have come in for criticism of their own on the conflicts front,” write Painter and Eisen, the latter who for a year was an adviser to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler before and during Trump’s impeachment trial, in which Trump was acquitted on counts of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
“Now Kushner is divesting his holding in Cadre, a real estate investment venture that profited handsomely from opportunity zones, a feature of the 2017 tax law that he and his wife worked on. Indeed, Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s very presence in the White House is presumptively illegal: Federal anti-nepotism law likely forbade their appointments from the outset,” they wrote.
Critics of the Trump family note how presidential sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump often travel to foreign countries with Secret Service protection to promote the Trump Organization, the president’s real estate company. One two-day trip in Uruguay taken in January 2019 amounted to a nearly $81,000 bill for taxpayers.
Liberal ethics watchdogs have cited over 3,000 potential conflicts of interest for the president, often pointing to alleged violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits government figures from receiving gifts given by foreign governments. Lawsuits against the president alleging emolument violations have largely failed in court.
Speaking about potential corruption in the Trump administration by any Democratic candidate is almost unavoidable. Avoiding conflicts of interest in the White House would be political malpractice by any individual seeking to win the White House in November.
But Biden is in a unique position where such attacks could potentially backfire. In campaign speeches, he regularly boasts about how the Obama administration had no “hint” of corruption. Republicans are looking to change the public’s perception of Biden to drive down his positive numbers and limit voter turnout.
Donald Trump Jr. is already looking to assist his father in that task and recently challenged Hunter Biden to a debate, in an interview with Axios.
“If you looked at my tax returns, which maybe we could talk about in this debate,” he said. “Let’s talk about who profited off of whose public service. Happy to do it. Let’s make it happen.”
Earlier this month, Sen. Ron Johnson told members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, of which he is chairman, he was prepared to subpoena a Burisma-tied company over its connection to Hunter Biden.
In a memo, the Wisconsin Republican said testimony from Blue Star Strategies “sought to leverage Hunter Biden’s role as a board member of Burisma to gain access to, and potentially influence matters at, the State Department.”
