Can We Forget Hunter Biden Now?
Terry H. Schwadron
Sept. 25, 2020
There is so much blather coming out of this election campaign that it seems necessary to decide when we have a real issue and when it’s just fluff for one side or the other.
It’s easy when Donald Trump criticizes Joe Biden’s facial plastic surgery, or when Biden reminds people that Trump, um, lies about almost every public policy. That’s noise.
But when two Senate committees take months to review whether the hiring of Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, by a Ukrainian energy company somehow compromised U.S. foreign policies being pursued by the father as vice president, it’s supposed to mean something important.
Their report came out this week — and it doesn’t mean a thing, either for understanding of foreign policy or about the character of Joe Biden or the arc of the election cycle. It’s a dud that, worse, shows the Republican committee chairs, Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who heads the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who heads Finance, to be targets themselves of foreign finagling at the hands of identified Russian intelligence operatives.
This was the big punchline: Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma Holdings, a Ukraine gas company, “cast a shadow” over Obama-era policy, the committees concluded. That’s it. No real evidence, no identifiable U.S. problem, just an “awkwardness” for the State Department at the time.
The report says that “the extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear.”
And the guy identified as talking about whatever awkwardness arose was George Kent — the same guy who said Donald Trump’s phone call to Ukraine’s president that led to impeachment was an abuse of power.
Shared embarrassment
This investigation was meant to embarrass the Bidens just a month before elections. It rather seems to embarrass its authors as so unduly partisan that they proved stooges for a Russian agent feeding them information.
So, don’t be surprised when Trump rewrites the conclusion as part of a rally or debate one-liner — which is rich coming from someone who has his family in senior White House positions.
As the facts tell us, Burisma hired Hunter Biden to a cushy board of directors’ job requiring next to nothing in expertise or even attendance, almost certainly on the strength of his last name. When they did so, an investigation into corruption at the company already had been abandoned — and Joe Biden was among world figures calling for a change in the chief prosecutor’s office in Ukraine for going after political targets. No evidence has suggested criminal wrongdoing by either Biden, though even Hunter Biden has acknowledged taking the job was “poor judgment.”
No kidding.
Kent, then deputy assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs and Amos Hochstein, a senior Obama-era State Department official both raised concerns about Hunter Biden’s work and the potential conflict of interest with U.S. Ukraine policy, according to the GOP report. Not much happened.
This Republican investigation also looked at financial transactions and travel that Hunter Biden took with a Secret Service detail while his father was vice president.
Russian interference
In the meantime, of course, the CIA has once again said in memos disclosed by news outlets that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “probably directing” a campaign of influence against Joe Biden, and FBI director Christopher Wray is telling Congress that the Russians are all over this election trying to foment anti-Biden feelings.
Whether Johnson and Grassley started their effort to blunt last year’s impeachment proceedings aside, they and Trump associate Rudy Giuliani have relied throughout on Ukrainian and Russian sources of anti-Biden propaganda.
In public statements, Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker who previously belonged to a pro-Russian party, claimed to have sent documents to Johnson and Grassley to aid in their probe. Johnson and Grassley have stated repeatedly that they have had no contact with Derkach, who was sanctioned by the Treasury Department earlier this month as an “active Russian agent.” Still, Johnson has had contact with another Ukrainian national, former diplomat Andriy Telizhenko, a former consultant working on behalf of Burisma, who argued that it was Ukraine, not Russia, interfering in the election four years ago. Democrats have suggested that Telizhenko may be functioning as a conduit for others to funnel Kremlin-backed conspiracies to congressional investigators. Johnson and Grassley have said that they vetted all of Telizhenko’s information through other sources.
So, on top of finding nothing, Democrats on the committees are using it all to say the investigation is a sham — much as Republicans have done with Democratic-inspired investigations.
Anyone trying to make sense of all this has but one conclusion: This is more noise than substance. On to the next shoe: A pending report from John Durham, the U.S. Attorney tasked by Atty. Gen. William P. Barr to investigate the Mueller Report investigators, an examination which also has no business landing just before elections.
##