Sleaze, Low And High

Jonathan Chiat, writing at New York magazine, lays out Joe Biden's Burisma problem:

In the waning years of the Obama administration, Hunter Biden, whose life was in a downward spiral, took a job with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was transparently attempting to gain influence with Hunter’s father. The maneuver was unsuccessful for Burisma (which received no favorable treatment from the vice-president), fairly successful for Hunter (who received a hefty paycheck for minimal work), and has left a residue of low-grade sleaze that Joe Biden’s campaign has proven unable to scrape away. The dilemma this poses for Biden, and his party, is what — if anything — they can do about this problem.

So far, Biden’s responses to questioning on his son’s role, which range from challenging his interlocutor to a push-up contest to trailing off awkwardly, have hardly allayed the concern. But it’s difficult to think of a better response, since a true answer is extremely difficult for a politician to communicate. And the true answer is: Yeah, I screwed up, but it’s actually not that big of a deal.

Biden’s error is that he created what used to be called “the appearance of impropriety,” a phrase that was common back before actual impropriety rendered it into a quaint anachronism. The appearance of impropriety is that Hunter Biden made money from Burisma, a Ukrainian firm, at a time when Joe Biden was directing the administration’s Ukraine policy, creating the appearance that Burisma bought Joe Biden’s favor. Indeed, President Trump has relentlessly charged that Burisma did in fact buy Biden’s favor. This is false. Biden demanded the firing of notoriously ineffectual prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who, at the time, was not investigating Burisma.

Firing Shokin was a unified demand of the pro-democratic world, and if anything, increased the legal jeopardy faced by Burisma. It would have been suspicious and potentially corrupt if Biden had not endorsed Shokin’s firing. His error was allowing his son to cash in on the false perception that he could sell access to his father. And by all accounts, Biden was too distracted by his job and distraught by the death of his other son to intervene in Hunter’s actions. It’s not nothing, but it is a small thing.

Democrats have bitter experience with this sort of flaw. Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of State is an eerily similar precursor. It was a small error borne of neglect — Clinton was a technophobe in search of an easy way to keep track of her work-related devices, and ignored proper security protocol for handling State Department email by using a private server. And Trump turned the small error into a gigantic scandal, accusing her of heinous crimes and ludicrously insisting she ought to be imprisoned over them. 

Later in the article, Chiat points out that the ranks of Trump officials who used private email to conduct official business include Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Stephen Miller, Gary Cohn, Steve Bannon, K.T. McFarland, and Reince Priebus. Since then, Nikki Haley has been found to have done the same.

And of course, Trump’s most blatant security breaches make the use of a private server look trivial. Trump has routinely used a cell phone to communicate and opened himself up to private espionage — like in the now-famous case in which he talked via cell phone to Gordon Sondland, who was in Kiev, in a call almost certainly intercepted by Russia. Most of Trump’s lax security protocol is both far more serious than Clinton’s snafu, and still not on anybody’s list of the 100 worst things Trump has done in office. (Click here to read the entire article.)