The Biden campaign is implementing strict rules about its staff communicating with officials from foreign governments, looking to avoid even the appearance of outside interference in the November election.
“Because of this poisonous environment created by the president, and so that there is no confusion as to whether or not we are inviting any assistance from foreign governments … our campaign has refrained from engaging in substantive conversations with foreign government officials, and would only do so under conditions that ensure transparency,” senior Biden campaign adviser Anthony Blinken told Politico.
Although Biden’s team says the rule is due to President Trump’s behavior in the 2016 campaign against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, the strict limits on staff is surely to avoid any repeat of the controversies surrounding Hunter Biden’s work with the gas firm Burisma.
Republicans and President Trump have repeatedly questioned why the Ukrainian company gave Hunter a lucrative position on its board, sometimes paying him $50,000 a month, from 2014 to 2019 despite him having little experience in the energy sector and a well-documented problem with drug use. Some of this time frame included when his father was leading the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.
Joe Biden’s critics contend the then-vice president’s pressure on the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor investigating Burisma is evidence of open corruption. Biden has repeatedly denied this accusation, and there is no evidence that the two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator interfered to assist his son. The former president of Ukraine said on Sunday that Biden “never” brought up Burisma in their conversations.
Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee, led by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, are currently investigating the firm and just completed the first round of subpoenas for a public relations company linked to Burisma, named Blue Star Strategies.
“The subpoena now has resulted in 2,600 pages of information, so we’ve learned that subpoenas work,” Johnson said earlier this month.
The limits on Biden’s campaign in terms of who it can contact has frustrated many of the 1,000-plus foreign policy advisers who work with the former vice president. Biden has long positioned himself on the campaign trail as someone who can restore dignity to the country and reassert its position as a global leader, but many say that these limits make it harder to sell that message.
Foreign diplomats contacting presidential campaigns has been a commonplace practice for decades, with outside governments hoping to build productive relationships with potential administrations. In 2016, both Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with foreign leaders such as Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al Sisi. Trump also flew to Mexico to meet with then-President Enrique Pena Neito to discuss immigration policy.
Some of those meetings by the Trump campaign blew up into major scandals; notably, a meeting between former adviser George Papadopolous and the Australian ambassador to the United Kingdom was one incident that sparked an FBI investigation. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s call with the Russian government before the inauguration had many Democrats accusing him of violating the Logan Act and colluding with a foreign government to undermine U.S. policy.
