Courts and LawElectionsScandals and InvestigationsTrump

Trump’s Fake War on Corruption

Sooner or later, Donald Trump’s impeachment defense had to come down to the claim that he wasn’t seeking election interference from foreign nations, he was simply trying to urge them to investigate corruption.

There was nowhere else for Trump to go. 

Trump’s solicitation of Ukraine and China (and maybe other countries as well) to investigate Joe Biden could no longer be disputed.  Aware of that inescapable fact, Trump pivoted from denial to open admission.

Trump’s admission that he asked Ukraine and China to investigate his likely opponent in the 2020 election goes part of the way toward establishing an impeachable violation of law. 

But it doesn’t go all the way.

Asking a foreign country to investigate alleged corruption, by itself, isn’t necessarily illegal, or even wrong.  Using the power of the United States to push allies and adversaries to fight corruption can be a good thing in appropriate circumstances.

What isn’t good – or legal – is asking a foreign country to interfere with a U.S. election.  And it doesn’t take a quid pro quo – “you help me politically and I’ll do something for you” – to make it illegal.  With or without a quid pro quo, it is both egregiously wrong and illegal for any person to “solicit, accept, or receive” a contribution of money “or other thing of value” from a foreign national. 

That left Trump with no options.

Unable to deny the fact of his solicitation of Ukraine and China, Trump had to deny the purpose.  It wasn’t help in the 2020 election that Trump was seeking when he asked Ukraine and China to investigate his political rival, the story goes, it was all just part of Trump’s War on Corruption:

As President of the United States, I have absolute right, perhaps even a duty, to investigate, or have investigated, CORRUPTION, and that would include asking, or suggesting, other Countries to help us out!

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1179925259417468928

Never mind that nobody ever heard of Trump’s War on Corruption, or that it seems to be focused exclusively on Joe Biden and his family. 

Never mind that the War on Corruption has never come up in Trump’s dealings with corrupt governments like North Korea, Saudi Arabia or the Philippines. 

Never mind that Biden isn’t the only candidate in the 2020 race with a child doing business in China:  Ivanka Trump received valuable trademarks from China, despite the fact that she had already closed her brand due to declining sales, just as Trump was engaging in negotiations with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Never mind all that.  If Trump was going to try to present himself as a corruption fighter instead of an election fixer, he had to come up with something about the Bidens that could be passed off, at least to his base and congressional enablers, as corruption worthy of investigation.

Enter Hunter Biden.

In the words of a former aid, “Hunter is super rich terrain” to be targeted for political attack.  “Hunter’s proximity to power shaped the arc of his career.”  In plain English, he has made a career out of being his father’s son.  The story of his troubled life – including the loss of his mother in a car wreck, career false-starts, struggles with booze and cocaine, failed rehabs – doesn’t come from dirty opposition research, but from Hunter’s own painful, public soul baring.

But cashing in on a famous name, while perhaps distasteful, is neither unusual nor the stuff of international corruption investigations.  Just ask Don, Eric or Ivanka Trump. 

So, if Trump was going to take advantage of this sad, damaged young man, he would have to amp up the story with allegations of something that looked like corruption, and somehow reflected not only on Hunter, but on his father, Joe.

Enter – oh lordy! – Steve Bannon and his gang of conspiracy-mongering trolls.

Bannon is the founder of the well-named Government Accountability Institute.  Despite its name, the Institute, largely funded by billionaire Trump supporter Robert Mercer, isn’t about accountability at all.  

It’s a dirt machine. 

As Joshua Green describes in his book “Devil’s Bargain,” Bannon designed the organization as a means of transmitting partisan dirt-digging to the mainstream media.  Its president is a Breitbart News editor-at-large named Peter Schweizer.  It’s the same organization that ginned up phony stories about the Clintons for use in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

In March of 2018, Schweizer and the Institute published a book that supposedly laid out conflicts of interest arising out of Hunter Biden’s service on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma.  And he tried to dirty up Biden’s father by suggesting that Joe Biden had used his position as Vice President to squelch an investigation that threatened his son with criminal prosecution.

While most of Trump’s conspiracy theories are too convoluted to comprehend, much less buy into, this one is really quite simple.  Trump’s accusation about the Biden family’s dealings with Ukraine boils down to the following:

  1. In 2014, Hunter Biden took a high-paying position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company run by a shady oligarch.  Biden’s only qualification for this position was that he was the son of the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden. 
  2. In 2016, Vice President Biden strong-armed the Ukrainian government to fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in order to thwart an investigation into Burisma that threatened to expose wrongdoing by his son.

The first piece of this narrative is largely true.  Given his sad history, Hunter Biden probably shouldn’t be judged too harshly for using his family name as a lifeline.  But taking a highly paid board position in a shady Ukrainian gas company at the same time his father was pushing Ukraine to clean up corruption was especially foolish.  It rightly raised questions of family privilege and at least the appearance of conflicts of interest.

But the second piece of Trump’s conspiracy theory, that VP Joe Biden wrongly brought about the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor in order to protect his son from indictment for corruption, is entirely false.

In fact, Shokin was fired for precisely the opposite reason.  He was fired because he wasn’t pursuing corruption among the country’s politicians.  Firing him didn’t end and couldn’t have ended Shokin’s inquiry into Burisma because he wasn’t conducting one.

In urging Ukraine to fire Shokin, Biden was executing U.S. foreign policy decisions that had been made in close consultation with our Western allies, the International Monetary Fund, and anti-corruption organizations in Ukraine and elsewhere.

In a nutshell, when it comes to Trump’s attempt to smear Biden for doing his job as Vice President, there’s no there there.

The same is true of Trump’s asking the repressive Communist government of China to investigate the Bidens.  It appears to be manufactured out of nothing.

Trump has suggested that China gave Hunter Biden $1.5 billion for influencing his father to enter trade deals that favored China more than the U.S.  “You know what they call that?  They call that a payoff,” Trump bellowed.

While companies associated with Hunter Biden (like members of Trump’s family), have done business with China over the past decade, there’s no evidence that Hunter Biden got rich from it, much less that he became a billionaire.  In fact, Hunter Biden’s lawyer says that Hunter earned nothing from the venture that Trump is apparently citing.  According to the New York Times, the $1.5 billion that Trump attributed to Hunter Biden appears to be the amount of money that a Shanghai-based company aimed to raise in 2014.  While Hunter Biden had an unpaid position on the company’s board at the time, he owned no interest in it until he purchased one in 2017, more than a year after his father had left the vice presidency.

By making these content-free narratives about the Bidens, Ukraine and China the centerpiece of his phony claim to be a corruption fighter, Trump proves only that his supposed War on Corruption is really just a War on Biden.

And the purpose of the War on Biden is to solicit foreign governments to contribute something of value – propaganda against a likely opponent – to Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign.

And that’s a crime.  Period.

Show More

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. You will not receive emails unless you opt in to Philip’s email list. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button