Biden will have Iowa virtually to himself as several rivals decamp to Washington for Trump’s impeachment trial.
But as Biden seeks to leverage his freedom with a final campaign blitz in the critical early voting state, he and his advisers know that the proceedings in Washington could overshadow any closing case they try to present.
Although he will be far from Capitol Hill, Biden is intertwined with the root cause of Trump’s impeachment case: The president pressured the Ukraine president to declare a public investigation of Biden and his son Hunter Biden based on discredited theories about the younger Biden’s foreign business dealings.
Biden himself sought to sidestep the issue during public appearances on Monday. But aides to the former vice president worked furiously to get ahead of any effort by Senate Republicans to use the trial to malign him.
Kate Bedingfield and Tony Blinken, top campaign aides to Biden, distributed a memo to the media saying Trump “is the only American president to have weaponized foreign and national security policy in an attempt to coerce a foreign country into lying about a rival presidential candidate.”
The document reflects that Trump’s claims have no basis and underscores the Biden campaign’s long-established strategy of aggressively countering Trump’s broadsides, a lesson his aides say they learned from Hillary Clinton’s handling of Trump in 2016. But it is also an acknowledgment that Biden cannot necessarily control this story line, especially as some Republicans and conservative media push the idea, however unlikely, that the Bidens should testify before the Senate.
With that in mind, the memo urged media not to repeat a “malicious and conclusively debunked conspiracy theory” from the White House and GOP claiming that the Bidens engaged in wrongdoing when Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian energy firm while his father handled U.S. foreign affairs in the same country.
Indeed, Trump’s unsupported assertions have always depended on the discredited accusation that the elder Biden pressed for the firing of top Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin to spare his son’s company, Burisma, from scrutiny. Ousting Shokin was, in fact, the official position of the U.S. government and its Western allies, including European Union nations and the International Monetary Fund leadership, because Shokin was believed to be incompetent or corrupt himself.