2020 Democratic front-runner Joe Biden is casting himself as the candidate Russian President Vladimir Putin fears the most.
Biden’s team seized on a New York Times report Monday, which said Russian hackers attempted to hack into Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas firm that employed Biden’s son Hunter and is at the center of President Trump’s impeachment, to claim it is not just Trump who is intimidated by the former vice president.
“Donald Trump tried to coerce Ukraine into lying about Joe Biden and a major bipartisan, international anti-corruption victory because he recognized that he can’t beat the vice president,” said Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates.
“Now we know that Vladimir Putin also sees Joe Biden as a threat,” Bates said. “Any American president who had not repeatedly encouraged foreign interventions of this kind would immediately condemn this attack on the sovereignty of our elections.”
Researchers from Area 1, a U.S. cybersecurity firm, discovered on New Year’s Eve that Russian hackers from the GRU targeted subsidiaries of Burisma as well as Kvartal 95, a Ukrainian television production company founded by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a similar manner to which Democrats were targeted in the 2016 election. The report, which notes that it is unclear what the hackers were looking for or what they may have found, does not have any immediate comment from the Russian government or Burisma.
Biden’s son Hunter, 49, earned $50,000 per month to serve on the board of Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm owned by a Ukrainian oligarch, from 2014 to 2019. The impeachment effort began last year after a whistleblower complaint revealed that Trump pressured Zelensky in a July phone call to open investigations into political rivals, including the Bidens, while withholding congressionally approved military aid.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that U.S. officials are investigating whether Russia is targeting Biden with a disinformation campaign echoing the attacks on Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.
In response to that report, Bates said, “Vladimir Putin has interfered in our elections before, and it’s no surprise he’s doing so again to prop up President Trump.”
