A tiny, largely unnoticed edit to a daily White House newsletter this week suggests the Trump administration is leaving open the possibility of siccing the Justice Department on Joe Biden.
The White House sent out its general-public newsletter, 1600 Daily, on Wednesday with a very conspicuous line buried in a series of talking points on the rapidly escalating scandal that has President Donald Trump on the verge of an impeachment vote.
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“This year,” the White House wrote, “President Trump has asked Ukraine to fully cooperate with the Justice Department’s investigation into the actions of former Vice President Joe Biden and his family in Ukraine.” The same language also appeared in a version of the newsletter posted on the White House website.
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Screenshot, The DailyThe line leaped off the page. No such investigation into the Bidens has been publicly announced, and DOJ did not respond to inquiries about the statement.
Initially, we thought that the statement must have been a simple mistake by a White House staffer conflating two different issues—a DOJ investigation into the origins of the Mueller probe, and a private investigation by the president’s personal attorney into the Biden family’s Ukrainian business dealings. And indeed, a White House official told PAY DIRT on Thursday that the newsletter's initial language was “written by a low level staffer, was incorrect, and we have fixed the error.”
But the updated version, which has since been removed from the White House website (as all issues of 1600 Daily are after 24 hours), raised many of the same questions. It says that the president “has asked Ukraine to fully cooperate with any Justice Department investigation into the actions of former Vice President Joe Biden and his family in Ukraine.” (Emphasis added.)
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Screenshot, The DailyThat very subtle tweak appears to leave open the possibility that the Justice Department might get involved in a scandal that is already shaking the Trump administration to its core.
Central to that scandal is the president’s alleged use of his position to advance his immediate political ends by attempting to convince Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to reopen an investigation to Biden’s son’s role on the board of an energy company in the country. Any simultaneous Justice Department investigation into the Bidens would represent a major escalation of the Trump administration’s use of the machinery of government to go after his political opponents, and would likely provide more ammunition for congressional Democrats eyeing impeachment.
In May, Trump publicly floated the possibility of requesting that Attorney General Bill Barr open an investigation into the Biden family over their Ukraine dealings. But there’s no indication that DOJ has yet taken that step.
Even absent such an investigation, the White House’s vague language illustrates some defining pathologies of its approach to the Biden-Ukraine issue, and how that approach has exacerbated an already perilous moment for Donald Trump’s presidency.
Trumpworld sees Biden and Mueller as inextricably linked: When Rudy Giuliani was first dispatched to Ukraine on his now-infamous investigative junket, his objectives were twofold. As The New York Times’ Ken Vogel reported in May, Giuliani sought to dig up dirt on the business activities of Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s youngest son, in particular his role on the board of natural-gas giant Burisma Holdings, and the elder Biden’s efforts to unseat a prosecutor ostensibly investigating corruption allegations involving the company.
But Giuliani had another objective: to unearth new information about the origins of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election-meddling. DOJ has since opened its own probe into Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI counterintelligence operation at the heart of the investigation.
Giuliani’s portion of the investigation quickly devolved into bizarre conspiracy-theorizing, culminating in Trump’s speculation on a call with Ukraine President Zelensky in July that Democratic National Committee email servers were in the possession of some unnamed Ukrainian national. Implicit in the conspiracy theory is that Russian agents were not, in fact, responsible for hacking those DNC emails.
The synergy between Giuliani’s two avenues of inquiry is evident in excerpts of an opposition-research dossier that the former New York City mayor helped compile and feed to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. My Daily Beast colleagues Erin Banco and Maxwell Tani obtained a page from that dossier, which the State Department’s inspector general turned over to Congress on Wednesday. It shows John Solomon, then a reporter for The Hill, sending an advance copy of a story on Ukraine to three Giuliani associates.
The Solomon report was a broadside against former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was later recalled under pressure from Trump allies. Those allies included former Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), who sent a letter to Pompeo last year questioning Yovanovitch’s work in Kyiv. The letter was dated the same day that Sessions was pictured meeting with Lev Parnas, a Florida businessman who has worked closely with Giuliani in Ukraine—and to whom Solomon also provided an advance copy of his Yovanovitch story.
The same synergy is evident in the language in Wednesday’s White House newsletter. PAY DIRT reached out to a plugged-in White House source about it on Wednesday night, and the official indicated that the statement in 1600 Daily was a reference to DOJ’s probe into the origins of the Mueller investigation, not a separate matter dealing exclusively with the Biden family.
No one seems to know what the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine have to do with the Mueller investigation. But the Trump administration seems convinced that the two are somehow linked—or, at the very least, that they can sell such links publicly.
The White House sees little daylight between private and official investigations: The president’s personal attorney is investigating the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine. As far as we know, DOJ is not. But the White House’s newsletter yesterday underscores the degree to which Giuliani has acted as an extension of the administration’s own investigative apparatus. It also signals the degree to which the administration sees the DOJ’s investigation into the Mueller probe origins as at least a potential avenue of inquiry into Biden himself.
The Democrats’ impeachment case against the president is based largely on the use of the power of the presidency in the service of Trump’s immediate political goals. That the White House is apparently conflating just those sorts of efforts, carried out by a man who is not actually a federal employee, with the official investigative work of the nation’s chief law-enforcement agency suggests Trump’s aides still don’t fully grasp that distinction.
When we read that line in 1600 Daily on Wednesday, it leaped off the page—not just because no such DOJ investigation into Biden had yet been announced, but because the simple fact of such an investigation would be the most dramatic illustration to date of the White House’s willingness to employ the machinery of the federal government in pursuit of nakedly political ends.
About that war room: The White House has all but abandoned plans to create some sort of “war room” to handle communications related to the rapidly escalating scandal surrounding the president's call with Zelensky. That’s left the president to steer messaging strategy, such as it is, according to his whims and emotional outbursts.
Yesterday’s newsletter, though, either revealed the existence of an effort to employ DOJ in Trump’s offensive against Biden, or, if such an effort is not in fact underway, represented just the sort of unforced error that might have been avoided by a dedicated team of communications operatives tasked with working on nothing but impeachment-related matters. Such a significant flub doesn’t bode well for the West Wing’s messaging efforts going forward.
