What We Learned From Leaked Biden Tapes -- And What We Didn’t
What We Learned From Leaked Biden Tapes -- And What We Didn’t
(Bloomberg) -- Leaked tapes allegedly featuring Joe Biden could once again drag Ukraine into U.S. politics as Donald Trump steps up attacks on the Obama administration ahead of the November election.
The recordings, released in a heavily edited version on Tuesday by a Ukrainian lawmaker who said he got them from investigative journalists, involve phone conversations between Biden -- at the time Barack Obama’s vice president -- and then-Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko.
On the tapes, Biden appears to tell Poroshenko that $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees will be provided to Ukraine once that country’s top prosecutor was replaced.
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, tweeted, “Yikes!!!! This is not a ‘perfect conversation.’” But Biden’s campaign said the tape is old news about a phone call he made for good reason. “They heavily edited this,” spokesman Andrew Bates said, “and it’s still a nothing-burger that landed with a thud.”
Here’s what we know about the tapes and the protagonists, and what we don’t.
1. Do the tapes contain anything damning?
The U.S., the International Monetary Fund and Ukrainian civil-society groups openly called for Prosecutor General Viktor Shokhin to be fired because he was widely considered to be corrupt and hindering the country’s anti-corruption efforts. Biden and Democrats have said that he simply delivered that message to Poroshenko. Trump and his associates have repeated a claim -- for which there’s no evidence -- that Biden wanted a new prosecutor to halt a possible probe into the company whose board his son was sitting on. Hunter Biden was a board member at Ukrainian gas company Burisma, whose owner was under investigation. There’s no mention of Burisma in the leaked tapes, and Poroshenko has said Biden never spoke to him about Hunter Biden or Burisma.
2. Who’s behind the release of the recordings?
Lawmaker Andriy Derkach is a former intelligence officer who holds a degree from the academy of Russia’s intelligence service and was once a member of ousted Russian-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. In 2017, as the U.S. was engulfed by allegations of Russian interference in the the previous year’s presidential election, Derkach pushed for an investigation into Ukrainian meddling in the vote -- another unsubstantiated claim voiced repeatedly by Trump. Last year, Derkach was one of the politicians who met with Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani in Kyiv even as top Ukrainian officials stayed away.
Poroshenko said Wednesday that the audio files were “fabricated” and released by a graduate of Moscow’s “top KGB school.” Ukraine’s current chief prosecutor has started an investigation into another accusation by Derkach: that the former leader committed treason and an act of corruption, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told reporters on Wednesday.
3. What does it all mean for the U.S. election?
Trump and Republican supporters have focused in recent days on what the president calls “Obamagate,” an unfounded conspiracy theory that the Obama administration and anti-Trump factions within the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department improperly tried to undermine his election campaign in 2016.
But there are signs that Republicans also want to revive the debate over Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and Burisma. On Wednesday, the Republican-led Senate Homeland Security panel voted to subpoena records from a Washington consulting firm that represented Burisma when Hunter Biden was on its board.
Bringing Ukraine back into the U.S. political debate poses risks for Trump. It would draw renewed attention to what the president has called his “perfect conversation” in which he asked Zelenskiy to investigate Biden. The Democratic-led House impeached Trump, contending that he improperly withheld U.S. aid to force Zelenskiy’s hand. The Republican-led Senate voted against removing him from office.
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