As the Senate begins President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial on Capitol Hill, Democrat Joe Biden is 1,000 miles away in Iowa, trying to capitalize on the circumstances without allowing the proceedings to overshadow the closing case he’s making ahead of the first 2020 votes. “The character of the nation is on the ballot,” Biden told a few hundred potential caucus-goers Tuesday at Iowa State University. “We’ve never seen … such an abuse of power by a president.” Yet Biden mostly sidestepped the potentially complicating reality that he’s 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. “I fully understand the way they tried to malign my only surviving son,” Joe Biden said in his only brush with the specifics. Yet Biden’s aides have worked furiously to get ahead of any effort by Senate Republicans to use the trial to smear him. Kate Bedingfield and Tony Blinken, top campaign aides to Biden, distributed a memo to the media on Monday, at the start of a three-day Iowa swing for Biden, 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 Joe Biden 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. House impeachment articles now being considered by the Senate are pegged to disclosures that Trump held up congressionally appropriated aid to Ukraine as he pressured President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to announce an investigation into the Bidens. The Biden campaign insists that Trump’s trial won’t distract from the former vice president’s campaign effort and can be a boon to Biden’s argument that he is the Democrat with the best shot to defeat Trump in November. “It’s certainly not something people talk about at town hall meetings,” insisted senior campaign adviser Anita Dunn. “It illustrates the lengths to which Donald Trump will go not to run against Joe Biden.” Indeed, no one in Ames asked Biden about Hunter Biden or the Senate trial, but there are instances from the campaign trail showing […]
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