Is Lindsey Graham’s Biden probe a play to hurt the Democrat’s presidential run?
On Nov. 21, Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham asked for transcripts of former Vice President Joe Biden’s phone calls with Ukraine, as well as State Department records involving a Ukrainian gas company where Biden’s son served as a director.
The move by Graham, in his position as chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, effectively launched a GOP-led congressional investigation into the Bidens, including the former vice president now vying to be President Donald Trump’s Democratic rival next year.
In doing so, Graham could help shift the attention away from Trump, the subject of a Democratic-led congressional impeachment inquiry aimed at deciding whether the president improperly tried to withhold aid from Ukraine to pressure that country into investigating the Bidens. That inquiry has had several televised hearings already.
Asked last week whether he launched the probe into his former Senate colleague to help Trump’s political cause, Graham said unanswered questions about the Bidens in Ukraine and unfairness to Trump are driving him.
And what’s fair is fair in politics, Graham says.
“I do like Joe Biden, I like him a lot. I think he’s a fine man,” Graham told reporters last week in Charleston. “I’ve traveled the world with him, but in 2008, when he was the running mate of Barack Obama, he fought hard against John McCain,” who like Graham was a fellow Senate colleague.
“That’s the way it works in politics, so I want to look at all things Ukraine, not just Trump allegations.”
Graham hasn’t always been a defender of Trump.
Four years ago, in the race for the GOP nomination for president, Graham called Trump all sorts of names: “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot”; a “kook,” “crazy,” “unfit for office.”
“You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell,” Graham told CNN in late 2015, weeks before he abandoned his own run for the GOP presidential nomination.
However, since 2016, Graham has evolved into one of Trump’s most loyal defenders. Breaks from that lockstep include Graham protesting Trump’s recent decision to pull troops out of northern Syria and the president’s unwillingness to further punish Saudi Arabia over what the CIA concluded was the assassination of a Washington Post columnist.
Graham’s latest effort could help legitimize Trump’s allegations against the Bidens, who Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate, according to diplomats testifying in the House impeachment inquiry. The senator is in a position to subpoena documents and hold hearings to question witnesses which would keep the question about the Bidens’ involvement with Ukraine in the news.
A distraction from impeachment
Some political observers say the Biden probe is designed to create a distraction as the Democratic-controlled House continues to explore whether the president tried to hold up foreign aid to Ukraine in exchange for a Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens.
“He’s basically following the White House play for a red herring,” said Scott Huffmon, a political science professor and pollster at Winthrop University.
“Whether it’s a tiny amount or large amount, some of the oxygen in all of Joe Biden’s (presidential campaign) appearances is eaten up by dealing with this,” Huffmon said, adding both the impeachment inquiry and Biden probe can be distractions. “The bigger the allegations get, the more he has to deal with it.”
But Graham’s move to use his leadership position on the Judiciary Committee to investigate the Bidens also can be a political win for South Carolina’s senior senator, Huffmon and others say.
President Trump is popular among Republicans in South Carolina, a state which he carried with 55 percent of the vote in the 2016 general election.
“Lindsey Graham has become Trump’s greatest cheerleader — this is what the people who voted in Lindsey Graham’s primary want to hear,” Huffmon said.
The move also helps Graham show loyalty to the president and keeps him in good graces with the White House.
“Graham’s calculation seems to be he could get more done by staying connected, he could get good things done and stop bad things from being done” by helping Trump and investigating Biden, said Chip Felkel, a Greenville-based GOP strategist.
“And it’s clear with this president, you’re either on the team or not, and Graham chose to be on the team.”
Presidential election politics?
In Charleston last week, Graham said his investigation doesn’t have anything to do with the presidential election in which Joe Biden is a front-runner to be Trump’s Democratic rival.
Saying he hopes his inquiry unearths nothing, Graham says questions remain about whether the former vice president acted to help his son or the company he represented.
“I think this is an effort to find out who did what. Nobody in the media seems to care about what role Hunter Biden played in terms of stopping the investigation into Burisma, a company (board) he was serving on where he received $50,000 a month. For what, I don’t know,” Graham said during a recent media availability.
“Was he hired as an insurance policy to make sure they wouldn’t be investigated? I don’t know. But I do know this. After the investigation into Burisma started, Hunter Biden contacted his friends in the State Department. The Vice President of the United States Joe Biden made three calls to the Ukrainian president, and I know six weeks later the investigation was terminated. I hope there’s nothing there.”
Graham has requested documents and transcripts from the State Department between Joe Biden and the former Ukrainian president from 2016. He also wants records from a 2016 meeting between then-Secretary of State John Kerry and a friend of Hunter Biden who also was on the board of Burisma, the gas company at the heart of the Biden story.
Graham also says the House impeachment inquiry is driving his Biden probe.
That inquiry, which follows the $32 million Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, is not fair to the president and is only designed to hurt Trump’s political standing heading into the election year, he said.
“I do not trust (House Intelligence Committee Chairman) Adam Schiff to be fair to the president. My conscience is clear. Very clear,” Graham told reporters in Charleston last week.
“We’re not going to live in a country where only one party gets investigated, and there are plenty of people in South Carolina that believe Hunter Biden’s association with this gas company is a conflict of interest. And they want to have questions asked of the other side.”
The Benghazi investigation and Hillary Clinton
This isn’t the first time a South Carolina Republican has been at the forefront of an investigation that featured a Democratic presidential candidate.
In May 2014, the House of Representatives created a select committee on the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, where four U.S. nationals, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed. The committee, headed by former South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy, was tasked at looking at policies and activities that contributed to the attack, as well as the U.S. response to them.
But much of attention during the investigation highlighted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s response before and after the attack, and the committee’s investigation became one of the talking points against Clinton’s run for the presidency in 2016.
Ultimately the two-year investigation, which cost about $7 million, according to NBC News, found the Obama administration made inter-agency mistakes when responding to the attacks. However, the committee’s final report did not specifically blame Clinton for any Benghazi related missteps.
And Graham has used his position in Congress to continue pursuing claimed about Clinton, who won the popular vote in 2016 by more than 2 million votes, but failed to win the electoral college.
Earlier this year, Graham called on a special counsel to investigate the Department of Justice’s handling of its investigation into Clinton and her use of a private email server and whether classified material was transmitted over it. Graham accused the federal agency of showing Clinton leniency.
Now Graham is calling for a U.S. Senate investigation into former Biden’s involvement in the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor when his son Hunter Biden was a director of Burisma, a gas company in Ukraine which, at some point, was under investigation.
According to media reports, Biden’s call for the prosecutor’s removal echoed the consensus of many western leaders, who widely praised the move. Campaign ads attacking Biden assert a connection between his push to fire the Ukrainian prosecutor and his son’s business ties, though those allegations have not been substantiated.
Whether President Donald Trump sought to hold up foreign aid to Ukraine unless it investigated the Bidens has now become the center of an impeachment inquiry.
As Graham’s inquiry shifts some of the national media attention away from impeachment and toward raising questions about whether Biden did anything wrong in Ukraine, Graham’s probe is following a similar playbook.
The hearings that ensnared former Secretary of State Clinton had a similar effect.
“The Benghazi hearings definitely helped Trump that they kept in the mind of Trump supporters a reason that Hillary shouldn’t be president,” Huffmon said.
“The comparison with Lindsey Graham is, whether it goes anywhere or not, these types of hearings, if he succeeds in getting them, would keep in the minds of people the questions about Biden.”
Will Graham’s Biden probe pay off?
Some S.C. political observers see Graham’s move to investigate Biden as fitting of a senator known for being a watch dog, and not necessarily a political moved aimed at taking out a Trump opponent.
“Senator Graham has always been a watchdog in the Senate,” said Matt Moore, who was S.C. GOP chairman in 2016. “I think he said, ‘Let’s take a look at everything on both sides, and let people make a decision.’ Senator Graham takes his role as a steward in the Senate very seriously, and unfortunately in this era of political trench warfare, things get twisted around. I think he has genuine motivations on the Judiciary Committee to take a look at these things.”
But others say the move could pay dividends for Graham and Trump.
First, Graham’s probe will help define the narrative around the Bidens’ involvement in the Ukraine.
“(Graham) seems to be very skillful. One of the things I noticed about him, he has a way of getting complex things down to a phrase that people could relate to,” said Dave Woodard, a retired Clemson University political scientist and former S.C. political strategist.
Second, the probe could have a chilling effect on Biden supporters in the general election, if he becomes the nominee, by making voters stay home, said Huffmon, the Winthrop political scientist.
“If it’s Biden versus Trump (in the general election), it is absolutely not about converting Biden voters to Trump, or vice versa,” Huffmon said of Graham’s efforts.
“It’s about Biden supporters just feeling so disengaged, they don’t want to turn up. That’s the best outcome that could come from someone who wants to elect Trump.”
If Biden becomes the Democratic nominee in 2020, Ukraine — and Trump and Biden’s history there — will likely be front and center heading into the general election.
“If he’s the nominee, I’m sure the Trump campaign will try to make as much out of it as they can regardless of what the Ukrainians say wasn’t there,” Felkel said.
“It’s not ideal for Biden’s campaign,” he added. “They would rather not talk about it, they would rather talk about other things. Just like the White House would rather not talk about quid pro quo” allegations in Ukraine.
Revelations about Trump or Biden in Ukraine may not change voters’ minds anyway, Moore added, noting that in today’s political climate, every action is seen through a political lens.
“I think the American public is weary given the past decade in American politics, it explains why the impeachment hearings have not moved the needle,” Moore said.
“Americans are inundated with political opinion from both sides every day, and short of the proverbial shooting on Fifth Avenue, their minds are made up.”
Moore was referring to a statement by Trump, saying he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and his supporters still would back him.
This story was originally published December 1, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
