Maaaayyybeee, but color me skeptical that Joe Biden’s brief renaissance means voters will take any more interest in Hunter Biden’s peccadilloes. Now that Biden has momentarily regained front-runner status, CNN’s Manu Raju asked Lindsey Graham whether Senate Republicans planned to pursue their investigation into corruption at Burisma and the Bidens’ potential roles in it. Graham told Raju that it’s definitely still on the menu:
…”while you're trying to clean up the country, yeah that will come up,” Graham said. Asked if he would investigate the matter, Graham said: “Ron Johnson's doing it.”
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) March 4, 2020
The Washington Post reported the same thing late Monday evening, even before it held as much political potential. Johnson, who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, has prepared the first subpoena in his Burisma probe, and has already let his committee know why he’s pushing it:
Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sent a letter Sunday to members of the panel informing them of his plan to force a vote on subpoenaing the witness, political consultant and former Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenko, who worked for a company called Blue Star Strategies that was a representative for Burisma in the United States. …
In his letter to members of the panel, Johnson wrote that he is “convinced obtaining Mr. Telizhenko’s Blue Star documents and information is an important part of this investigation.”
“I sincerely hope the members of the Committee will agree and support this subpoena,” he wrote.
Johnson offered a slightly more nuanced argument for investigating Hunter Biden now, but … not much more nuanced:
NEW: Ron Johnson says he’ll likely release an interim report within next 1-2 months on his cmte’s Biden probe.
He insists it has nothing to do w/ the election, but “if I were a Democrat primary voter I’d want these questions satisfactorily answered before I cast my final vote.”
— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) March 4, 2020
That time frame would drop that “interim report” just at the end of the primary cycle for Democrats. On its current trajectory, the Democratic primary might be still evenly split and on track for only a plurality for Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders before the Milwaukee convention. There’s no way that could be perceived as a political plot, amirite?
Unless they uncover something so significant that its provenance can’t be disputed, though, this seems unlikely to matter much. Trump has already made his point about the Bidens and Burisma (and China, Romania, etc etc); even the media has taken note of how Biden’s family members get rich around him on unusual deals linked to Biden’s own work. For Trump’s purposes, ambiguity might work a lot better than certainty, especially if that certainty tends to undermine Trump’s arguments.
But even more to the point, most voters will have tired out on this topic at about the same time they tired out on Ukraine-Gate. That point was reached well before Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, and maybe even before the articles of impeachment passed in the House. If there’s one thing voters really seem to dislike most, it’s re-runs.
