Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Ukraine: What you need to know
House Democrats are considering the impeachment of President Donald Trump, who talked with the leader of Ukraine about investigating his political rival Joe Biden. Biden’s son Hunter was a director at a Ukrainian energy company when his father served as vice president.
Trump and his allies have charged that Biden and his son Hunter acted improperly. But PolitiFact and other fact-checkers have found little substance to these allegations. Hunter Biden did do work in Ukraine, but we found nothing to suggest Vice President Biden acted to help him or discouraged investigations of his son.
Now, Democrats see Trump’s interactions with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as efforts to bully a foreign country into doing something helpful for his own re-election campaign, possibly using U.S. military aid to Ukraine as leverage. Congress found out about the events after news reports of a whistleblower’s complaint.
Here are seven pressing questions and answers about Trump and Biden.
- What did Trump allegedly do regarding Biden and Ukraine?
Trump asked President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani on a probe of the Bidens. Democrats have linked Trump’s request in a July 25 phone call to Zelensky with the slow-walking of $400 million in U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
- What do we know about the whistleblower?
The whistleblower has not been identified as of this writing. What we do know is that an unnamed intelligence official filed a whistleblower complaint Aug. 12 to Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community. Atkinson found the complaint credible and a matter of "urgent concern." But the director of national intelligence, or DNI, did not turn the complaint over to Congress as the law requires. (The Justice Department advised the DNI that the conduct described in the complaint was outside the scope of the whistleblower statute.) Atkinson said in a letter to Congress that he disagreed with the DNI’s determination but was bound to abide by it.
- In what way would Trump’s actions be problematic under the law?
Experts told PolitiFact that Trump’s interactions with the Ukrainian president could be impeachable if they amounted to self-dealing. "If the allegations are true that Trump demanded an investigation into the Biden family in exchange for military aid that was already approved for Ukraine, that could cons ute bribery, which is specifically listed in the cons ution as a basis for impeachment," said Barbara McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor who was U.S attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan appointed by President Barack Obama.
- What was Hunter Biden’s role at a Ukrainian company?
Hunter Biden held a directorship with a natural gas company called Burisma Holdings, beginning in 2014. Reuters reported that the company said the younger Biden would help the company with "transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion," and other issues. The company also retained the law firm where Biden had been working, Boies Schiller Flexner.
Burisma was owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, a minister under Russia-friendly President Viktor F. Yanukovych, who subsequently went into exile after a popular revolution. After Yanukovych was ousted, Zlochevsky faced a variety of corruption-related investigations involving his business.
In 2015, Ukraine’s newly appointed prosecutor general Viktor Shokin inherited some of the investigations into Zlochevsky and Burisima. (Zlochevsky and the company have denied the allegations.) Shokin was ousted as prosecutor in 2016.
In May 2019, Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, told Bloomberg that "Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws — at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing."
- Was the Ukrainian oil company Hunter Biden worked for under investigation?
At times, Burisma has attracted attention from investigators. Despite the Trump camp’s suggestions, however, it’s not clear that Burisma was actively under investigation during the period when Biden was a director. Key figures have said opposing things on that point.
In an interview with the Ukrainian website Strana.ua, Shokin said the cases were indeed active. But Vitaliy Kasko, who had been Shokin’s deputy overseeing international cooperation, produced do ents to Bloomberg that under Shokin, the investigation into Burisma had been dormant.
- Did Joe Biden act improperly to shield Burisma for his son?
Biden's actions seemed to encourage aggressive investigation of all corruption in Ukraine. Biden said he threatened to withhold aid unless Shokin was sacked, and Biden was hardly alone in calling for Shokin’s ouster. Western leaders and ins utions were largely united in seeking Shokin’s removal for ignoring corruption investigations.
In early 2016, for example,International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde said that "it’s hard to see how the I.M.F.-supported program can continue" unless corruption prosecutions accelerate.
Shokin "failed to prosecute anybody of significance,” protecting the Yanukovych circle, said Anders Åslund, a resident senior fellow at the think tank the Atlantic Council, in an interview with PolitiFact in May.
- Was Hunter Biden’s position at a minimum a conflict of interest?
Yes. There is wide agreement among Ukraine policy experts that Hunter Biden’s decision to become a Burisma director presented a serious conflict of interest.
"It’s not a crime, but it is a lapse. It’s troubling," said Lincoln A. Mitc , an adjunct research scholar at Columbia University’s Arnold A. Saltzman Ins ute of War and Peace Studies who has written about governance in the former Soviet Union.
Yoshiko Herrera, a University of Wisconsin professor who previously headed the university’s Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia, said Hunter Biden’s hiring echoes a strategy common within Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, in which powerful interests try to secure influence on foreign policy by leveraging family members and associates of key leaders.
"Conflict-of-interest rules should have applied,” Herrera said. “If Biden is working for the Obama administration on Ukraine, his son should not have been on the board of a company there that could be affected by U.S. policy spearheaded by his father."
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... you give so much weight to these public denials
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