Pundits, politicos divided on calling Hunter Biden as witness
WASHINGTON — As senators prepare for a possible vote on whether to call witnesses in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, Democrats and even some news organizations have argued that former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter should be off limits — on the Senate witness stand and even in news stories.
House impeachment managers have called for the testimony of four witnesses, most notably former national security adviser John Bolton, who according to The New York Times wrote a tell-all book in which he revealed that Trump told him to freeze military aid to Ukraine until it announced an investigation of the Bidens.
It’s a charge that goes to the heart of the first article of impeachment, abuse of power, passed by the House by a 230-197 vote on Dec. 18.
And it is a charge that Trump and his team of lawyers deny.
Yet Trump’s legal team has countered that it should be able to call its own witnesses, and over two days of the trial’s questions and answers, GOP senators and lawyers have made a habit of mentioning Hunter Biden.
Biden on the board
In spring 2014, Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma announced it was bringing on Hunter Biden as a director. According to news accounts, Burisma paid the younger Biden some $50,000 per month while Joe Biden was President Barack Obama’s point man for the fight to stamp out corruption in Ukraine.
Hunter Biden, a graduate of Georgetown University with a law degree from Yale, was the subject of speculation before Trump’s Ukraine phone call blew up. In May, The New York Times reported that when Burisma retained Biden, “he lacked any experience in Ukraine and just months earlier had been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine.”
In July, The New Yorker ran a story with the headline, “Will Hunter Biden jeopardize his father’s campaign?”
But Trump did more than criticize Hunter Biden’s position on the Burisma board. According to a transcript of the July 25 call, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to look into “talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution” of Burisma and even bragged about it.
In a 2018 appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations, Joe Biden recalled a visit to Kyiv during which he threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees if Ukraine didn’t fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.
In a video that later went viral, Biden said he told the audience he warned Ukraine’s president in 2015, “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.”
Fact checkers, nonetheless, rated Trump’s remarks as false because, as The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler observed, there were two big problems with what the president said. “One, Shokin was not investigating Burisma or Hunter Biden, and two, Shokin’s ouster was considered a diplomatic victory.”
Daria Kaleniuk of the Ukrainian Anti-Corruption Action Center told the Post, “Shokin was not fired because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.”
But for many voters the issue isn’t why Biden moved to fire Shokin — according to Politifact, there were widespread calls for the prosecutor’s ouster — so much as why Biden didn’t prevent his son from taking the job with Burisma. According to an interview in The New Yorker, Hunter Biden recalled his father told him, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Witness or not?
It’s not clear if the Senate will choose to include witness testimony; that probably will be decided during a vote Friday. Talk that surfaced last week about a compromise that would allow the prosecution and defense to put their preferred witnesses on the stand — a deal that could have put Bolton and Hunter Biden or his father in the hot seat — is over.
On the presidential campaign trail, Biden said he would not participate in a witness swap, the New York Post reported, because “this is a constitutional issue. And we’re not going to turn it into a farce, into some kind of political theater.”
Would he let his son take the stand? “I’m not going to play his game,” he said, referring to Trump. “The Senate’s job is now to try him. My job is to beat him.”
House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Joe and Hunter Biden’s testimony would be irrelevant. “None of those people is responsible for Trump’s misconduct,” he said Thursday.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed: “Hunter Biden is irrelevant and a distraction.”
“There’s nothing he could possibly offer of evidence,” former Nevada U.S. Attorney Greg Brower said. “Because Hunter Biden clearly was not a participant in the Ukrainian scheme that is the subject of Article I and was obviously not a participant in the obstruction of Congress that is the subject of Article II, he cannot possibly be a relevant witness.”
One Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, said he didn’t have a problem with calling Hunter Biden as a witness. “Now I think he can clear himself, what I know and what I’ve heard, but being afraid to put anyone (on the stand) that might have pertinent information is wrong, no matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican,” Manchin told “Morning Joe” on Wednesday.
Schumer later told reporters it didn’t matter how Manchin voted. “Republicans could call Hunter Biden” to the stand at any time, he said, but “they don’t want to.”
“I think Senate Republicans see the issue as leverage as a way to prevent John Bolton or other relevant witnesses from testifying,” said Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs for Common Cause.
A trial without witnesses
GOP strategist Brad Blakeman, a senior attorney in President George W. Bush’s administration, told the Review-Journal he expects the Senate trial to end in acquittal Friday without witnesses being called.
“Really the issue before the impeachment is, did the president do anything wrong?” Blakeman asked. “Was the call wrong? No.”
Besides, Blakeman offered, on the stand Hunter Biden — the surviving Biden son after his older brother Beau succumbed to brain cancer in 2015 — could be a very sympathetic figure, like his father, who endured the loss of wife Neilia and daughter Naomi in a car crash in 1972.
Still, Blakeman sees Hunter Biden as a fit subject for a congressional investigation, even as many media figures discourage investigative pieces that look into the Bidens and Burisma.
News organizations have reported on the arrangement. The Washington Post ran a story in May 2014 that noted Burisma’s “murky” ownership and framed the hire as “nepotistic at best, nefarious at worst.”
“Who does Hunter Biden really work for?” German media company Deutsche Welle asked at the time.
A story or not?
In the anti-Trump Bulwark last week, writer Tim Miller called the Hunter Biden story a “nontroversy.”
In the Columbia Journalism Review on Thursday, Jon Allsop warned journalists not to cover the Hunter Biden saga with the same attention reporters, in his view, wrongly covered Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016.
In September in The Atlantic, James Fallows faulted leading media outlets for lumping together “whatever Donald Trump may be guilty of” in Ukraine to “whatever Joe Biden’s son Hunter may have done there.”
“To be ‘fair’ in covering (Trump) is to be unfair — to the truth, to history, to the readers, to the national interest, to any concept of journalistic purpose,” Fallows argued.
Biden spokesman Andrew Bates dismissed GOP calls to look into Burisma as motivated solely by 2020.
“Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress for most of the last five years and said or did nothing to indicate they thought that this warranted attention,” he told Politico in November. “As recently as a few weeks ago, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said that such an investigation would be a circus. What changed?”
Is the Biden-Burisma connection a story? Common Cause’s Scherb still opposes calling a Biden as a witness, but he observed, “It certainly looks bad, smells bad and continues to undermine faith and confidence in government.”
Contact Debra Saunders at DSaunders@reviewjournal.com or 202-662-7391. Follow @DebraJSaunders on Twitter.
