Biden needs to admit he, Hunter made mistakes

Former vice president Joe Biden’s astonishing political success over the past week has felt like a bandwagon for sensible politics. But to keep it rolling towards the general election in November, Biden will have to do something his rival President Trump would never consider: admit that he and his son made mistakes.
Trump’s allies are already aiming their next artillery barrage at Biden for his alleged conflicts of interest with his son Hunter’s business activities in Ukraine. Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis, announced that he’s preparing a subpoena for a witness who worked at Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that paid Hunter handsomely as director while his father was leading Ukraine anti-corruption efforts for the Obama administration.
We all know that Johnson’s foray is just the beginning. Trump and his allies have been preparing this assault for more than a year. The impeachment investigation documented that Trump wanted damaging information about Biden so badly that he temporarily cut off military aid to Ukraine to try to obtain it.
Biden’s denials of wrongdoing have been entirely accurate, but they haven’t been enough. They don’t
acknowledge something that’s clear to many Republicans and Democrats: Hunter should have quit the Burisma board, or his father should have withdrawn from the lead role on Ukraine. The two didn’t mix. Biden didn’t do anything corrupt, but his patchwork of careful statements doesn’t address perceptions.
Biden and his son are going to have a confessional moment on this, sooner or later. Better sooner. For this is actually a story that most Americans can relate to. It’s about a loving father and a son whose life was falling apart. It’s about families in pain and the difficulty of keeping faith with people we love. It brings out what’s most likable in Biden, if he would let himself explain the story honestly.
Tearing off this scab is just what Biden hasn’t been willing to do. “Anything that smacks of throwing his son under the bus is to him a non-starter,” explains a member of the Biden circle.
Hunter’s story was well narrated by Adam Entous in the New Yorker last July. The piece described a young man with marital problems, who joined the Burisma board in 2014 after his beloved brother Beau had the first lesion removed from what would be a fatal brain cancer. Hunter was “in bad shape” at the time, and “fragile”, the close Biden friend told me.
Hunter was warned to avoid Burisma. “I begged Hunter to walk away,” one man who counseled Hunter in 2014 told me. It was obvious to him that the controversial Ukrainian company wanted to buff its reputation by adding the Biden name to its board. That’s not an unusual thing with corporate boards — many directors are hired for their connections — but it’s a dubious practice, at best.
But Hunter persisted. “I don’t have a choice,” he told the man who advised him against Burisma. He explained that his brother was sick, his father had political ambitions, and “I need to make money”.
Biden has told aides that he wasn’t aware that Hunter had joined the Burisma board until after it had happened. At that time, he had already taken
the administration lead
on Ukrainian corruption. What should he have done? A former Biden aide says that White House ethics policy was to avoid interaction with independent adult children in any such employment matters. Was that wise? The answer to me is clearly not.
Trump and Rudolph
Giuliani, his personal lawyer, have been pressing Ukrainians since 2018 for dirt about Biden and his son. Giuliani obtained details about the Burisma matter in January 2019 interviews with former prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Yuri Lutsenko (who themselves have been subjects of corruption accusations). Republicans will be replaying versions of this dubious dossier all summer and
fall, along with allegations about Hunter’s business dealings in China while his father was vice president.
Hunter himself has stated the obvious: “In retrospect, look, I think that it was poor judgment on my part” to take the Burisma position, he told ABC News last October, adding: “Did I do anything improper? No, not in any way.”
But Joe Biden still bristles. There’s a deep wound here, one that goes back to his first wife’s death when Hunter was a child, his son Beau’s death, and maybe to a father’s regret at being unable to help mend a hurting child.
This drama is the stuff of real life and, ultimately, of healing and renewal. Biden needs to start telling it, for Hunter’s sake as much as for his own.

—The Washington Post

David Ignatius is an American
journalist and novelist. He is an
associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post