Ukraine eats away at Biden’s biggest strength: electability

Joe Biden speaks at a town hall meeting in Maquoketa, Iowa, on Thursday. Picture: AP

Joe Biden has a Hunter problem, and it’s not going away. We saw that during the former US vice-president’s tone-deaf appearance on 60 Minutes.

Before we get to the Sunday interview, some context: In February 2014, Ukrainians pushed out president Viktor Yanukovych, widely reviled for both tolerating corruption and delaying and then rejecting a popular agreement that tied the country closer to the EU. Mr Yanukovych escaped to Moscow, where Vladimir Putin gave him refuge.

The next month, Putin seized Crimea and in April he invaded eastern Ukraine, taking control of a significant amount of Ukrainian territory in a war that continues today.

At about the same time, Biden’s son Hunter joined the board of Burisma, Ukraine’s largest gas company, along with Devon Archer, a longtime associate of then-secretary of state John Kerry. The younger Biden received as much as $US600,000 a year for attending a handful of company meetings, despite his complete lack of experience in the energy business or Ukraine.

Burisma was controlled by an Ukrainian oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky. He formed the company after serving under Yanukovych as Ukraine’s minister of ecology and natural resources and doling out gas distribution rights, some of which ended up with Burisma.

By April 2014, the month the younger Biden joined Burisma, the UK had opened a money-laundering probe into Zlochevsky and froze $US23m in his London bank accounts. (Zlochevsky was never convicted of any crimes and denied any wrongdoing, and the money was later released after Ukrainian officials failed to co-operate with the investigation.) In August 2014, the Ukrainian prosecutor general announced an investigation into Burisma and Zlochevsky.

That case was closed in 2016 and no charges were filed.

Even before his son joined Burisma, vice-president Biden had been leading US efforts to encourage Ukraine to crack down on the country’s corruption, which was giving ammunition to those Ukrainians seeking accommodation with Russia. In October 2014, Ukraine responded by creating a new anti-corruption bureau and a special prosecutor to handle the cases it developed. By late 2015, the vice-president was calling for the ouster of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general for going soft on corruption.

With that as background, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell asked the former vice-president on Sunday, “You understand people say, ‘Joe Biden, he’s an experienced politician, statesman, knows the issues of Ukraine. Why didn’t he just say to his son, This is one to take a pass on. It may not look good.’ ” Biden’s reply was that his son “was already on the board and he’s a grown man. And it turns out he did not do a single thing wrong.”

So Hunter Biden’s cashing in on his dad’s position by joining a murky Ukrainian company’s board for which he was unqualified wasn’t wrong. Apparently it’s perfectly acceptable for Hunter to be paid vast sums to lend Burisma his last name as a potential shield against action from Kiev. After all, Hunter is a grown man.

So is his father. And the senior Biden had plenty of time between April 2014 and December 2015 to either tell his son to get off Burisma’s board or inform president Barack Obama that he, the vice-president, was compromised because of his son’s involvement and couldn’t take the lead on pressuring Ukraine on anti-corruption issues. Neither happened.

How could the elder Biden be so blind to the impropriety of his son serving on Burisma’s board while he was pressuring Ukraine to fight the corruption that Burisma allegedly represented?

There were many public warnings. When Burisma announced the appointment of the younger Biden and Archer in May 2014, it drew criticism in The Washington Post and elsewhere.

When the vice-president went to Kiev in December 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported on the conflict of interest, quoting a Ukrainian anti-corruption official: “If an investigator sees the son of the vice-president of the United States is part of the management of a company … that investigator will be uncomfortable pushing the case forward”.

Obama, Kerry and national security adviser Susan Rice also bear responsibility. Were they blind to the conflict of interest or simply unwilling to tell good old Uncle Joe that his son’s activities were problematic?

Joe Biden’s campaign is already plagued by big challenges from poor fundraising to subpar debate performances to a dismal message. The Hunter debacle has eaten away at the vice-president’s greatest strength: he’s the most electable Democrat.

The Hunter-Burisma problem that’s plaguing the Biden campaign could have been avoided. It wasn’t.

And now it’s here to stay.

Karl Rove twice masterminded the election of George W. Bush