With Trump under threat, his allies are seizing on various defenses. Most aren't great.
For Trump’s experienced defenders, the president’s solicitation of electoral aid from a foreign country, the possibility that he leveraged government resources to solicit that aid and his administration’s alleged effort to hide that solicitation poses a new and evolving challenge. Over the past week, they’ve had to follow Trump’s shifting explanations as information came out. (Remember when Trump claimed that he was just looking to combat corruption?) With the past two days’ document releases — the rough transcript of a call with Ukraine’s president and a complaint from an intelligence community whistleblower — his defenders have been operating on quickly shifting terrain.
With that in mind, we decided to evaluate those arguments. How effective have Trump’s team and his defenders been at repelling the looming allegations?
The answer, in short, is: not terribly.
Joe Biden did it, too.
While the rest of this article focuses on recently emerging defenses, it’s worth lifting up one of the central ongoing claims made by Trump and his team: Former vice president Joe Biden was the one who acted inappropriately.
The assertion here is that Biden pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor in December 2015 because the prosecutor was investigating a company who had hired Biden’s son Hunter as a board member. Biden even bragged about withholding aid to Ukraine in early 2018 at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations.
By now, though, this has been shown to be an inaccurate depiction of what happened. The prosecutor at the time, Viktor Shokin, was broadly and publicly criticized for not acting on corruption cases — including criticism from other members of the U.S. government. It’s not clear there was an investigation at that point into the company for which Hunter Biden worked, much less one targeting Hunter Biden. There’s been no evidence to emerge tying Joe Biden’s request to a defense of Hunter.
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