As bipartisan experts on government ethics, we are appalled to see that President Donald Trump and his GOP Senate enablers are reviving the canard that there are conflict issues that merit investigation relating to the Bidens and Ukraine.
As with his fabricated allegations against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump's election-year "alternative facts" misinformation machine is in high gear. This time it's Sen. Ron Johnson, Wisconsin Republican, and the majority on his Homeland Security Committee that threaten a subpoena.
In fact, it is the Trump family that has ethics issues that should be investigated — not the Bidens.
Trump's sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are traveling the world at substantial cost to taxpayers while managing the president's businesses — enterprises that have racked up a stunning 3,000-plus conflicts of interest for Trump. That includes unconstitutional emoluments from the Chinese, Saudi, Kuwaiti, Malaysian, Philippine and many other governments. The president's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who as government officials are bound by federal ethics laws, have come in for criticism on the conflicts front.
Kushner is divesting his holding in Cadre, a real estate venture that profited handsomely from opportunity zones, a feature of the 2017 tax law that he and his wife worked on. Kushner and Ivanka Trump's very presence in the White House is illegal: Federal anti-nepotism law likely forbade their appointments.
Hunter Biden did not have any conflict of interest in his position with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, in 2014, when Joe Biden was in government. Unlike Ivanka Trump and her husband, Hunter Biden was not a government employee during the Obama administration. As for Joe Biden, there is no requirement that officials recuse from foreign policy matters because those matters might have a financial impact on a business that has hired the official's grown child.
Adult children are allowed to live separate lives under the ethics rules. Their independent career decisions are not imputed to their parent who works in the government. But for the entanglement of the Trump children with their father's ethics issues (if the president had fully divested his conflicted businesses and avoided nepotism), we would have no cavil with them.
As White House ethics lawyers in the Obama and George W. Bush White Houses, we would not have required the vice president to recuse from matters involving Ukraine simply because his son was on the board of a Ukrainian company. [...]
President Barack Obama asked Joe Biden to coordinate important aspects of U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine. He never got involved in any particular matter involving Burisma. All of the vice president's actions were fully consistent with the policy of the State Department, Britain and the European Union, our allies on Ukraine matters.