With Trump seizing on a familiar defense, saying Democrats were undertaking a “witch hunt” against him on Ukraine, Biden called on the House of Representatives to begin a new investigation of whether the president sought the interference of a foreign government to help bolster his reelection campaign.
“This appears to be an overwhelming abuse of power,” Biden said during a campaign swing in Iowa. “We have never seen anything like this from any president.”
The sharp accusations between Trump and Biden, who leads the field for the Democratic presidential nomination, elevated the president’s dealings with Ukraine — and the secret complaint by a whistleblower in the intelligence community against Trump — as potentially significant new issues in the presidential race.
The controversy has focused on whether Trump abused his power by trying to get foreign actors to look into a possible political foe at home. But the president is also trying to deflect attention and refocus it on the past financial dealings abroad of Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, at a time when a new brand of anti-Washington populism is ascendant in both political parties.
As reports that Trump sought help from the Ukrainian government shake the country, Biden and other leading Democrats struggled with the realization that next year’s election could be an even more bitter version of their last presidential contest.
Trump on Saturday dismissed news reports that he urged the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden’s son, and defended his own conduct as “perfectly fine” and routine.
“Now that the Democrats and the Fake News Media have gone ‘bust’ on every other of their Witch Hunt schemes, they are trying to start one just as ridiculous as the others, call it Ukraine Witch Hunt,” Trump wrote on Twitter. He said that any effort to investigate him would fail, comparing it to the investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, into his ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign.
The news reports he was referring to have revealed the existence of a secret whistleblower complaint that is believed to have been filed, at least in part, in response to Trump’s dealings with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The New York Times reported Friday that Trump, in a July call, pressed the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden’s son, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
On Saturday, Trump, intensifying a line of attack he and his allies have stoked for months, said the real problem was Biden and questions about what the president described as “the Joe Biden demand that the Ukrainian Government fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son.” Trump, referring to his conversation with Zelenskiy, said: “Nothing was said that was in any way wrong, but Biden’s demand, on the other hand, was a complete and total disaster.”
No evidence has surfaced to bolster Trump’s claim that the former vice president intentionally tried to help his son by pressing for the prosecutor general’s dismissal.
The issue strikes a particular nerve for Biden, who has long feared putting his family under the harsh spotlight of a presidential campaign. During a two-minute encounter with reporters on Saturday morning, he grew irate, angrily insisting that he had never spoken with his son about any overseas work and assailing the president for an “overwhelming abuse of power.”
“You should be looking at Trump,” Biden said. “Trump is doing this because he knows I’ll beat him like a drum.”
Though he has yet to call for impeachment proceedings against Trump to begin — as have several of his rivals for the 2020 Democratic nomination — Biden on Saturday tiptoed closer to embracing the idea that has been steadily gaining support on Capitol Hill despite opposition from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
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 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.
Donna Brazile, the former Democratic National Committee chairwoman who led the party through Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump three years ago, said the exchange “in many ways feels like 2016.”
Just the prominent discussion of the actions of Biden and his son in Ukraine, regardless of the merits of the president’s accusations, has the potential to hurt Biden, Brazile said.
“We’re basically creating a political story which right now is undermining Joe Biden when I do believe the real focus should be getting the substance of the complaint out to the American people as soon as possible,” she said Saturday.
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 to yet another round of probing questions about the younger Biden’s moneymaking activities in Ukraine.
The Biden campaign moved quickly to browbeat the media over the story, underscoring a deep concern about how allegations about the younger Biden’s work will be received by voters. “Any article, segment analysis and commentary that does not demonstrably state at the outset that there is no factual basis for Trump’s claim, and in fact that they are wholly discredited, is misleading reading and viewers,” said deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield, in an email to reporters.
But Biden advisers also seized on the furor to portray the president as fixated on, and worried about, a potential general election race against Biden.
“There is only one candidate the president is trying to get foreign governments to dig up bogus dirt on,” Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Biden, said.
Even as they avoided mentioning Biden, other Democratic presidential candidates moved quickly to capitalize on the new dynamic in the race. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who rarely mentions Trump in her stump speech, opened her remarks at a cattle call on Saturday afternoon by excoriating both the president and congressional Democrats.
“He has solicited another foreign government to attack our election system,” she told a crowd of 1,200 cheering Democratic voters gathered in Des Moines for an afternoon of primary speeches. “It is time to call out this illegal behavior and start impeachment proceedings right now.”
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.
Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy 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 news media. Still, the re-emergence of the younger Biden’s business dealings this past 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.
Citing the reports by journalists seemed contradictory given the president’s claim that the media had not reported on Biden. But the tweets signaled that Trump and his campaign organization would be doing as much as possible to sow doubt about Biden.
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.
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.
Warren, who first called for Trump to be impeached in April after the release of Mueller’s report, also renewed those demands, but went even further, arguing that by failing to act on impeachment in preceding months, Congress had become “complicit in Mr. Trump’s latest attempt to solicit foreign interference to aid him in US 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 cuts a stark contrast with his two leading rivals, Warren and Sen. 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.
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.
This article originally appeared in
.