Now, as reports that he sought help from the Ukrainian government shake the political world, former Vice President Joe Biden, the monthslong leader in the primary race, finds himself grappling with the fallout of a still-secret whistleblower complaint that is said to be about Trump and his dealings with Ukraine.
For Biden, it is both the contrast he wants and the controversy he would rather avoid.
The revelations offered voters a preview of what is likely to be an extraordinary general election contest if Biden were to win the nomination, one in which attacks by the president and his team could boomerang, transforming Biden into a sympathetic figure under ugly attack with foreign help.
It could just as easily mark a defining moment for Biden, a 76-year-old politician first elected to the Senate in 1972 and long accustomed to playing by the more genteel political rules of a different era.
While the new report gives Biden the one-on-one showdown with Trump that his campaign has spent months trying to create, it also exposes him and his son, Hunter Biden, to yet another round of probing questions about their moneymaking activities and personal family struggles.
At a time when some of the candidates had been shifting their strategy from trying to chip away at Biden’s persistent lead to attacking the ascendant candidacy of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the new reporting once again places Biden at the center of the 2020 campaign.
Biden, whose appearances on the campaign trail can be halting and sprinkled with misstatements, has generally delivered his strongest performances when focused on Trump. Speaking about the president allows Biden to discuss foreign policy and national security, issues that his campaign has said differentiate Biden, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, from the rest of the 2020 Democratic field.
Yet Biden’s initial response was to brush off the new revelations and stick to his campaign schedule in Iowa, offering only a meager retort.
“I have no comment except the president should start to be president,” he told reporters, walking quickly to a waiting van.
At issue are demands from Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, that Ukraine examine Biden’s dealings with the country when he was vice president at the same time that his younger son, Hunter Biden, was doing business there.
Trump and Giuliani have reportedly pressed for an investigation of the Bidens for weeks, after reports this year in The New York Times and elsewhere examined whether a Ukrainian energy company had sought to buy influence in Washington by hiring Hunter Biden. The younger Biden had a lobbying business in Ukraine while his father was vice president.
Biden’s team believes the accusations that his son improperly leveraged his family name on behalf of his lobbying clients have already been widely debunked in the media. Still, the re-emergence of the younger Biden’s business dealings this week invites a new round of scrutiny from the press, allies of Trump and Biden’s many remaining opponents in the primary.
On Saturday morning, Trump posted a video mash-up of TV news footage of stories about Biden’s son. “This is the real and only story,” the president wrote.
So far, Biden’s rivals, nearly all of whom descended on Iowa this weekend, have resisted taking the bait. Several of his competitors were quick to assail Trump on Friday, while avoiding commentary about how Trump’s accusations against the Bidens would affect the Democratic nominating contest.
Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana said Trump had exhibited the “behavior you’d expect from an incompetent mobster.” Rep.Tim Ryan of Ohio urged Congress to hold hearings and investigate the whistleblower’s allegations. And Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, whose campaign manager on Friday released a memo stating he would have to drop out of the race if he failed to raise $1.7 million before the end of September, remarked that “this is not a partisan issue,” while Booker and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas reiterated their calls for Trump to be impeached.
“I’m going to keep the focus on the fact that Donald Trump has broken the law if this report is accurate and he should be impeached,” former Housing Secretary Julián Castro said during an interview Friday night in Cedar Rapids. “That’s where the focus belongs right now.”
Warren, who first called for Trump to be impeached in April after the release of a report by the special counsel Robert Mueller, renewed those demands, but went even further, arguing that by failing to act on impeachment in preceding months, Congress had become “complicit in Trump’s latest attempt to solicit foreign interference to aid him in U.S. elections.”
“Today’s news confirmed he thinks he’s above the law,” she said. “If we do nothing, he’ll be right.”
Even if Biden’s primary competitors don’t take direct aim, the perception of the Biden family leveraging its connections — even if little more than a conspiracy theory — cuts a stark contrast with his two leading rivals, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have centered their candidacies around a fierce populist message of rooting out corruption in Washington.
It’s a message that worked in 2016 for Trump, who cast Hillary Clinton as the avatar of establishment self-dealing, a past-her-prime creature of Washington unable to adjust to the times and produce real change.
Biden’s team is acutely aware of that comparison, and a few hours after Biden’s non-comment, his campaign decided to go further.
Sensing an opportunity to highlight Trump’s fixation with Biden, his aides released a statement in his name blistering the president for “abhorrent” conduct and demanding Trump release the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian leader and allow the director of national intelligence to release the whistleblower’s claims to Congress.
“There is only one candidate the president is trying to get foreign governments to dig up bogus dirt on,” said Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Biden.
But Biden stopped short of offering a full-throated endorsement of moving forward with impeachment proceedings, an idea that has been gaining traction on Capitol Hill and within the Democratic primary field despite opposition from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Advisers to Biden said his initial reluctance reflected his prudence about discussing sensitive national security matters rather than unease with the work of his son in Ukraine. But the former vice president is highly sensitive about questions regarding his family, and it was not until other outlets had confirmed the initial Wall Street Journal report that the Biden campaign determined it should try to go on the offensive.
His appearances on Friday were marked by moments of testiness.
While taking questions outside a Cedar Rapids nature center Friday afternoon, Biden offered a sharp retort to Angie Weiland, a 59-year-old dental hygienist, who pressed him to support a single-payer health care plan like one backed by Sanders and Warren.
“God love you, you’ve got the right candidate in Bernie or Elizabeth or whoever you have,” Biden said. “Tell Elizabeth it’s going to cost a lot of money and you have to raise people’s taxes.”
A few hours later, Biden snapped at the female moderator leading a forum on LGBTQ issues after she questioned his decades-old votes for laws outlawing same-sex marriage and prohibiting gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, as well as his contention, offered in February and then quickly retracted, that Vice President Mike Pence is “a decent guy.”
Before an audience of 700 activists at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Biden sarcastically called his inquisitor, the Cedar Rapids Gazette columnist Liz Lenz, “a lovely person,” prompting her to reply: “Just asking the questions people want to know.”
Offstage after their exchange, she wrote on Twitter that Biden had called her “a real sweetheart,” a comment she said in a subsequent interview that she found to be “a little condescending.”
By Friday night, Biden’s campaign was fully embracing the argument that Trump’s attempted intervention with Kyiv was evidence about which candidate he did not want to run against, blasting out a fundraising email that even alluded to Hunter Biden. “Donald Trump asked a foreign leader eight times to investigate my family,” the money request went. “But I’m only going to ask you once.”
While Biden may embrace that message, his rivals have repeatedly questioned his age and his grasp on the fiercely polarized politics of the Trump era.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota cited her past three years in the Senate as experience that differentiated her from Biden.
“I’ve been able to navigate through this recent era, the Trump era,” she said. “I’ve been living it for two years.”
This article originally appeared in
.