Sen. Ron Johnson insists revived effort to discredit Joe Biden has nothing to do with 2020 election (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)


A month after Donald Trump’s impeachment trial for abuse of power, the Trump camp has renewed the campaign using Ukraine to tarnish Presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Senate Republicans announced the revival of discredited allegations, only hours after Biden re-established his front-runner status in the Democratic nomination race with a series of Super Tuesday victories.

Sen. Ron Johnson, a Trump ally who chairs the Homeland Security Committee, announced the campaign to reporters on Wednesday. He said that he is likely to release an interim report on the role of Biden’s son Hunter, who was on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, within one to two months.

Trump followed up on Wednesday night on Fox TV: “[Biden and Ukraine] will be a major issue in the campaign, I will bring that up all the time because I don’t see anyway out.”

The Trump camp has long spread the discredited conspiracy theory that the elder Biden obtained the dismissal of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General in March 2016 to protect Hunter and Burisma from investigation. In fact, the file had long been closed on the gas company, and Viktor Shokin was removed by the Ukrainian Parliament for his failure to deal with corruption.

But from November 2018, Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani pursued a 10-month effort for Ukraine’s investigations to undermine Biden — whom they saw as the likely Democratic nominee for the November 2020 election — and to cover up Russia’s interference in the 2016 vote.

That campaign included disinformation, meetings with former and current Ukrainian officials, and Trump’s July 25 call with new President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Trump froze military aid to Kyiv until the investigations were announced. The outcome threatened US and Ukrainian security, according to 17 witnesses in Trump’s impeachment hearings.

Some Republican senators admitted, even as they voted not to convict Trump, that he had abused power. But Johnson swept that aside on Wednesday, referencing Trump’s re-election campaign: “These are questions that Joe Biden has not adequately answered. And if I were a Democrat primary voter, I’d want these questions satisfactorily answered before I cast my final vote.”

The Senator insisted that the timing of his announcement had nothing to do with Super Tuesday.

However, Democrats linked the initiative with the warnings of the US intelligence community that Russia is trying again to influence the outcome of a US Presidential election. House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff said:

I am concerned to see that in the Senate there seems to be a renewed interest in furthering these bogus Russian narratives through the use of their investigative powers.

I just think it’s so deeply destructive to be effectively working in a concert with Russian propaganda artists.

Ironically, Johnson was among senators from both parties who signed a letter in 2016 supporting then-Vice President Biden’s anti-corruption efforts, on behalf of the Obama Administration, in Ukraine.

Biden’s campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement, “Senator Johnson just accidentally did us an enormous favor by explicitly admitting that he is abusing congressional authority in a manner that would make the founding fathers spin in their graves.”