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Seeking to undermine Democratic rival Joe Biden, US President Donald Trump’s campaign is fueling a family line of attack: unverified allegations about Biden’s son and his overseas business ties.
But report in the New York Post, and the appearance of a man who says he worked with Hunter Biden, have raised more questions than answers, including about the authenticity of the emails at the center of the story.
The origins of the new allegations can be traced back to Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, who has repeatedly defended unsubstantiated claims about the Bidens.
Even if the emails in the Post are legitimate, they do not validate Trump and Giuliani’s claims that Biden’s actions were influenced by their son’s business.
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A look at development:
How did Biden’s son become a campaign issue?
Hunter Biden joined the board of directors of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2014, when his father, then vice president of the United States, was helping to conduct the Obama administration’s foreign policy with Ukraine.
Andrew Harnik / AP
The Biden campaign said in a statement that it had reviewed Biden’s schedules since then and that no meeting as described by the newspaper was held.
Senate Republicans said in a recent report that the appointment may have raised a conflict of interest, but did not present evidence that the hiring influenced US policy.
Meanwhile, Trump and his supporters have advanced a widely discredited theory that Biden lobbied for Ukraine’s chief prosecutor to be fired to protect his son and Burisma from the investigation.
In fact, Biden lobbied for the prosecutor to be fired, but that’s because he reflected the official position not only of the Obama administration but of many Western countries and because the prosecutor was perceived as soft on corruption.
What does the New York Post say?
The primary email highlighted by the Post is an April 2015 message that said it was sent to Hunter Biden by Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the Burisma board. In it, he thanks young Biden “for inviting me to DC and giving me the opportunity to meet your father and spend time together. It is truly an honor and a pleasure. “
The wording makes it unclear whether he actually knew Joe Biden. The Biden campaign said in a statement that it had reviewed Biden’s schedules since then and that no meeting as described by the newspaper was held.
How did the Post get the emails?
It is a tangled saga. The Post says it received a copy of a hard drive containing the messages from Giuliani, who has promoted the idea that Ukraine was trying to interfere in the 2016 election and that young Biden may have gotten rich by selling his access to his father.
The Post says the emails were part of a treasure trove of data recovered from a laptop that was left at a computer repair shop in Delaware in April 2019. It says the customer, whom the owner could not definitively identify as Hunter Biden, never paid. the service or got it back, and says the owner made a copy of the hard drive that he gave to Giuliani’s lawyer.
The Wilmington store owner declined to comment with The Associated Press, but in media interviews he said he contacted the FBI through an intermediary and provided agents with a copy of the contents of the hard drive.
Strategy and International Center / Wikimedia Commons
Hunter Biden himself has not spoken publicly in recent weeks, even to confirm whether the laptop is his or not.
Are the new emails authentic?
Hunter Biden himself has not spoken publicly in recent weeks, even to confirm whether the laptop is his or not. The Biden campaign has also not addressed that question, although a Hunter Biden attorney, George Mesires, said in a statement that “we have no idea where this came from, and we certainly cannot credit anything that Rudy Giuliani provided to the NY Post.” .
Some former national security officials and other experts said the episode raised multiple red flags of a possible foreign disinformation effort, especially given Giuliani’s involvement and his active role in promoting an anti-Biden narrative on Ukraine.
But John Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence, rejected that idea, saying: “The intelligence community does not believe that because there is no intelligence to back it up.”
The FBI appeared to back Ratcliffe’s position in a letter to a Senate committee that had requested information about the laptop.
“Regarding the subject of your letter, we have nothing to add at this time to the October 19 public statement of the Director of National Intelligence on available actionable intelligence,” wrote Jill Tyson, director of the Office of Congressional Affairs, in the letter. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican Chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Affairs and Homeland Security.
Tyson also said he could not confirm or deny the existence of any investigation, consistent with the practice of the Department of Justice.
Charles Krupa / AP
The origins of the new allegations can be traced back to Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, who has repeatedly defended unsubstantiated claims about the Bidens.
If authentic, are the emails hurting Biden?
The suggestion that Joe Biden might have met with a representative from Burisma is significant, because he has repeatedly insisted that he never discussed his son’s business with him.
But the emails do not provide details on whether Pozharskyi and Biden actually met and, if so, what they discussed.
If Biden met with Pozharskyi, he was not the only American official who could have. Pozharskyi was part of a Burisma delegation that lobbied congressional officials in 2014 in an attempt to show that the company was not a corruption risk.
What is the political impact?
With Election Day approaching and with polls showing him behind Biden, Trump appears to be returning to the subject of his opponent’s family to energize his base.
But in an election dominated by concerns about the coronavirus pandemic, Trump’s strategy is less certain to attract voters he needs to win back, including moderate Republicans and suburban women.
Trump peppered accusations against Biden and his son in the second and final presidential debate. Before the debate, the Trump campaign also hosted a press event with Tony Bobulinski, a man who it said was Hunter Biden’s former business partner. Bobulinski made unsubstantiated accusations that the vice president’s son consulted with his father about trade deals related to China.
The Associated Press was unable to independently verify Bobulinski’s allegations.
Meanwhile, the Biden campaign pointed to the recent Republican-led Senate investigation that found no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden regarding Ukraine. He also deliberately pointed to Giuliani’s involvement, saying that his “discredited conspiracy theories and his alliance with figures related to Russian intelligence have been widely reported.”
