Joe Biden’s campaign is punching back at a New York Post story that alleged a direct link between the Democratic presidential nominee and his son’s business dealings.
Top Biden advisers who staffed him during his vice presidency, citing their own recollections as well as a review of Biden’s official schedules, sharply rejected the Post’s suggestion that Biden met with a representative of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings in 2015. And social media companies throttled sharing of the article on their platforms, fueling complaints from conservatives that information critical of the Bidens was being censored.
The story, which ran on the front page of the New York tabloid under the banner headline “Biden Secret E-mails,” accused the then-vice president of meeting Vadym Pozharskyi, a top adviser to Burisma, whose board Biden’s son had joined at the time. Allies of President Donald Trump seized on the purported revelation to argue that it proved Biden had abused his position to intervene with the Ukrainian government on his son’s behalf — and that he had lied when he insisted he had steered clear of his son’s business dealings.
The Post’s story drew immediate comparisons to 2016, when Russian hackers dumped troves of emails from Democrats onto the internet — producing few damaging revelations but fueling accusations of corruption by Trump.
There was no immediate indication of Russian involvement in the release of emails that the Post obtained, but its general thrust mirrors a narrative that U.S. intelligence agencies have described as part of an active Russian disinformation effort aimed at the 2020 election.
The story also amplified a line of attack Republican senators have pursued in recent months, culminating in a report that leveled a farrago of accusations against Hunter Biden. The cast of characters is equally familiar: Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney whose amateur sleuthing in Ukraine helped lead to Trump’s impeachment, features prominently in the story, as does Steve Bannon, the 2016 Trump aide who steered opposition research that portrayed Clinton as corrupt but were often misleading or factually dubious.
Trump spent the first 10 minutes of his rally on Wednesday evening in Des Moines, Iowa, reciting aspects of the Post story and lashing Hunter Biden, suggesting the allegations should disqualify his father from the presidency and hinting at the likelihood of additional disclosures to come — a nod to Giuliani’s promise of additional document dumps about the Biden family…