#he's not the focus of this frame (cedric is) but it's something about his pose

[it-came-autumnally]

Was rewatching the Kiseki game openings and please look at this Rufus from the CS3 OP

[bountyofbeads]

Under Attack From Trump, Biden Wrestles With Response https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/05/us/politics/biden-trump-ukraine.html

Biden Faced His Biggest Challenge, and Struggled to Form a Response

As Trump made unfounded allegations about Biden and his son, the former vice president was torn over what to do. He now looks more vulnerable than at any point in the campaign.

By Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns and Katie Glueck | Published Oct. 5, 2019 Updated 5:28 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted October 5, 2019 5:50 PM ET |

WASHINGTON — Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential campaign was under attack, and he and his advisers were torn over what to do.

For more than a week, President Trump had been hurling unfounded accusations about Mr. Biden, his son Hunter and their dealings in Ukraine. Mr. Biden and his advisers debated whether to mount a fierce counterattack or to stick to a set of policy arguments he had been planning to roll out. Bad news loomed in the background: Mr. Biden’s poll numbers had already grown wobbly, his fund-raising was uneven, and cable news was flashing chyrons by the hour showing Mr. Trump’s wild claims.

Mr. Biden himself was equivocating: He wanted to defend and protect his son, but he also believed the president was baiting him into a dirty fight. And as a lifelong adherent to congressional tradition, Mr. Biden was wary of acting hastily as an impeachment inquiry was getting underway.

The strain grew so acute that some of Mr. Biden’s advisers lashed out at their own party, taking the unusual step of urging campaign surrogates to criticize the Democratic National Committee — a neutral body in the primary — for not doing more to defend Mr. Biden, while the Republican National Committee was running TV ads attacking him. Frustrated, D.N.C. officials informed the Biden camp that it would continue denouncing Mr. Trump but would not run ads for Mr. Biden or any other candidate.

The Biden campaign’s tense deliberations reached a climax last weekend when Mr. Biden agreed to give a scorching rebuttal to Mr. Trump in a speech on Wednesday in Reno, Nev. But he delivered it well into the evening on the East Coast, and it was mostly lost amid another long day of Trumpian  eruptions.

To some Biden allies, it seemed too little too late: a case study in political indecision. Now Mr. Biden looks more vulnerable than at any point since he entered the campaign. Facing one of the greatest challenges of his candidacy, Mr. Biden has plainly struggled to meet the moment, or fully reconcile his own cautious instincts with his protectiveness of his family’s privacy and his preference for taking the moral high road against Mr. Trump.

Interviews with more than 50 Democratic strategists, lawmakers and lobbyists provide a portrait of a candidacy facing challenges on all sides, and one at risk of losing its core argument that Mr. Biden is the Democrat best able to defeat Mr. Trump in a general election.

There is no evidence behind Mr. Trump’s claim that Mr. Biden intervened inappropriately with Ukraine to help his son, but Democrats have been unnerved by the president’s onslaught and Mr. Biden’s halting response.

In addition to the attacks from Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden’s top rivals, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, each out-raised him in the third quarter by about $10 million. And as Ms. Warren has emerged as Mr. Biden’s most formidable competition, Mr. Sanders, her main challenger for progressive support, just had a heart attack, casting uncertainty over whether he could siphon votes from Ms. Warren, as the Biden camp had hoped.

Even before last week, Mr. Biden’s advisers were acknowledging to donors that he may well lose both of the leadoff nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

His communications aides contend that most voters were more focused on what Mr. Trump did to prompt the impeachment inquiry than on the false claims themselves. And they pointed to the former vice president’s forceful attacks on Mr. Trump at a news conference Friday to argue that he was now ready to do battle with the president.

“This guy like all bullies is a coward,” Mr. Biden said. “He does not want to run against me.”

On Thursday, Mr. Biden, whose inner monologue rarely remains repressed, gave voice to the tension he is struggling with as he spoke at a fund-raiser in Palo Alto, Calif.

Recalling the difficulty Hillary Clinton had in confronting Mr. Trump’s campaign style, Mr. Biden worried about being “sucked into the trap of the stuff that Trump was laying. He wants you in a mud fight.”

“But when you respond to that,” he continued, “it brings you back down into that.”

Mr. Biden was even blunter, and angrier, in private after news first emerged that Mr. Trump had exhorted the Ukrainian government to investigate him and his son.

“I can’t believe this guy is going after my family like this,” he told Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, as the two campaigned in Iowa, Mr. Coons recalled.

Leading Democrats have been pleading privately with Mr. Biden and his top aides to aggressively confront Mr. Trump, and expressing impatience with them for not seizing this opportunity to engage him in a two-man race. After all, Mr. Biden had spent months framing his candidacy as a singular crusade to oust an aberrant president.

“It’s time to really respond so everybody hears it,” said Representative Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a campaign co-chairman. “If someone says something enough, people will start to believe it, and this president gets in his zone of telling a lie over and over again. You have to make sure people don’t believe in it.”

David Plouffe, former President Barack Obama’s campaign manager, was mystified. Mr. Biden “should use this moment and become Trump’s opponent,” Mr. Plouffe said. “I don’t understand it.”

But Mr. Biden is confronting an almost unimaginable situation: the president he hopes to challenge is facing impeachment for urging another country to help smear him. What’s more, the House inquiry centers on what Mr. Biden values most in his private and public life: protecting his family and honoring institutional norms.

Several Democrats close to Mr. Biden say he did not take on Mr. Trump sooner in large part because of his reverence for congressional prerogatives — he did not want to immediately insert himself into the House’s jurisdiction. But Mr. Biden also sought to address the attacks on his son on his own terms rather than sit for hastily arranged television interviews that would have forced him to answer questions about Hunter Biden’s work that few of his own aides dared pose.

Now, just as his monthslong lead in the primary is eroding, he faces an opponent who’s threatening his son, the political system he dedicated his adult life to and, as he approaches his 77th birthday, his last chance to become president.

Worried About His Family

For Mr. Biden’s campaign, no attack could have been more difficult to deal with than one involving the candidate’s son.

Mr. Biden nearly did not run for president because of the effect it would have on his family — and particularly on Hunter Biden and his children, according to multiple advisers to the former vice president. Hunter Biden has struggled for years with substance addiction and had recently gone through a very public divorce from his first wife.

In separate interviews, Mr. Coons and his fellow senator from Delaware, Tom Carper, both said they had warned Mr. Biden that the president would target his family.

“He expected his family to be attacked,” Mr. Carper said, adding that Mr. Biden assured him he was braced for “the onslaught.’’

Mr. Biden’s family, including his son, encouraged him to enter the race, knowing the attacks were inevitable. But as Anita Dunn, one of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers, put it: “When it happens, it still feels pretty lousy.”

The Biden campaign has attempted to handle the candidate’s son with great sensitivity. Mr. Biden made clear at the outset that Hunter, a lawyer who had long advised his father on his campaigns, should not be made to feel excluded, people who spoke with him said. One adviser to Mr. Biden recently telephoned his son to solicit advice on the upcoming debate in Ohio.

But to most of Mr. Biden’s aides, Hunter Biden has been a spectral presence. He is living in Los Angeles and stayed away from Mr. Biden’s campaign launch in Philadelphia. Hunter Biden quietly attended the last two debates and appeared with his new wife, Melissa Cohen, at a July fund-raiser in Pasadena, Calif.

Still, Mr. Biden’s advisers are aware that Hunter Biden carries political vulnerabilities. His business career has intersected repeatedly with his father’s political power, through roles he had held in banking, lobbying and international finance. Working for a Ukrainian energy company beginning in 2014, he was paid as much as $50,000 a month while his father was vice president, and some of Mr. Biden’s admirers worry that, while Mr. Trump’s accusations are without merit, voters may view Hunter Biden’s actions as problematic.

Even one of Mr. Biden’s Democratic rivals, Beto O’Rourke, said on Saturday that he would not allow “anyone in my cabinet to have a family member to work in a position like that.”

In the past, Mr. Biden has bristled at questions about whether his family had benefited financially from his political career. He did so again on Friday when he was asked whether his son’s work in Ukraine represented a conflict of interest. Pointing a finger at the questioner he said: “Let’s focus on the problem. Focus on this man, what he’s doing, that no president has ever done. No president!” The Trump campaign was soon circulating a clip of the episode.

For his allies, it is both poignant and painful that Mr. Biden’s family is again at the heart of his public identity. He lost his first wife and daughter, and nearly lost his two sons, in a car accident in the weeks after he was elected to the Senate in 1972. His final years as vice president, as well as his hopes to run for president in 2016, were overwhelmed by his elder son Beau’s death from brain cancer.

Jim Mowrer, a former Democratic congressional candidate from Iowa who served with Beau Biden in the military, said he spoke to Hunter Biden early this year and got the impression he was trying to focus on personal matters rather than the campaign. Mr. Mowrer said he saw the elder Mr. Biden in Iowa last month and they discussed not Hunter but his other son, Beau.

“Beau’s death is very, very fresh in his mind, and so now these attacks on Hunter are even more unsettling,” Mr. Mowrer said.

A Big Bet On South Carolina

The politics of Ukraine and impeachment have been so costly for Mr. Biden, in part, because he is confronting so many other challenges in the Democratic race: a struggle to excite liberal primary voters, an ascendant rival in Ms. Warren and a decline in fund-raising that has forced him to spend even more time appealing to donors in cities hundreds of miles from the early primary states.

Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, Greg Schultz, acknowledged some of those problems in a briefing for Democratic donors at Morgan Stanley’s New York office last month. Mr. Schultz assured the group that they had a path to the nomination that depended on winning South Carolina — the fourth primary state — and then scoring big victories in the Super Tuesday primaries in March.

In South Carolina, where Mr. Biden’s support appears strongest among the early-voting states, some of his supporters are discussing a trip to Iowa before Thanksgiving — to vouch for the former vice president, and to emphasize his ability to appeal to minority constituencies, like African-Americans.

“We probably know Joe Biden a lot better than they do,” said State Senator Dick Harpootlian of South Carolina, a Biden supporter.

Mr. Schultz acknowledged at the briefing that Mr. Biden had been uneven at times during debates and on the stump. Still, he predicted Mr. Biden would maintain an advantage over Ms. Warren, saying she would struggle to overcome the persistent competition on the left from Mr. Sanders.

But Ms. Warren has recently pulled well ahead of Mr. Sanders. Now, even Mr. Biden’s own campaign aides privately acknowledge that South Carolina may not be much of a political firewall if Ms. Warren rolls through Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada.

As he finds his way forward, Mr. Biden is relying on a circle of advisers, some formal and others less so, but there is no chief strategist. Mike Donilon, who wrote much of the Reno speech, may be the closest person to playing that role. Democrats who know Mr. Biden well say the campaign is mostly in his hands — and he makes the final calls.

While Mr. Biden’s team has done little polling in the race, he is expected to conduct a survey of Iowa Democrats next week on the Ukraine issue ahead of a new advertising push in the state.

Mr. Biden has begun to escalate his attacks on the president, and his campaign began airing a commercial  hitting back at the president for trying to “pick his opponent and face only the candidates he thinks he can beat.” Still, there is no final consensus, in Mr. Biden’s camp, about how consistently he should confront Mr. Trump.

“He’s never gone negative,” said William M. Daley, the former White House chief of staff, who worked on Mr. Biden’s 1988 campaign. “That’s not him, that’s the charm of Joe.”

Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

Meet the Ukrainian Ex-Prosecutor Behind the Impeachment Furor

By Andrew E. Kramer, Andrew Higgins and Michael Schwirtz | Published Oct. 5, 2019 Updated 1:15 p.m. ET |

KIEV, Ukraine — As soon as he got the invitation from Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, it was abundantly clear to him what Mr. Trump’s allies were after.

“I understood very well what would interest them,” Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine’s recently fired prosecutor general, said in an extensive interview in London. “I have 23 years in politics. I knew.”

“I’m a political animal,” he added.

When Mr. Lutsenko sat down with Mr. Giuliani in New York in January, he recalled, his expectations were confirmed: The president’s lawyer wanted him to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter.

It was the start of what both sides hoped would be a mutually beneficial relationship — but one that is now central to the impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump and his allies have been fixated on Ukraine since the 2016 American election, convinced that the country holds the key to unlock what they view as a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump. Mr. Giuliani in particular has viewed Ukraine as a potentially rich source of information beneficial to Mr. Trump and harmful to his opponents, including Mr. Biden.

But a detailed look at Mr. Lutsenko’s record shows how Mr. Trump and his allies embraced and relied on a Ukrainian prosecutor with no formal legal training and a long history of wielding the law as a weapon in his personal political battles, disregarding the concerns of senior diplomats who said he wasn’t credible.

Mr. Trump praised him in a phone call with Ukraine’s president. Mr. Giuliani aggressively promoted the news that Mr. Lutsenko’s office had revived an investigation into the owner of a Ukrainian energy company that had hired Mr. Biden’s son. And in an interview with Fox News in April, Mr. Trump described Mr. Lutsenko’s claims as “big” and “incredible,” worthy of attention from the American attorney general.

Mr. Trump’s allies even seemed to favor Mr. Lutsenko over the American ambassador in Ukraine, who was recalled as the president’s supporters stepped up pressure on the country to investigate the Bidens. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Biden or his son in Ukraine.

In the impeachment debate, Ukraine has often seemed an innocent bystander, a poor and deeply troubled country on Europe’s eastern fringe sideswiped by the raucous political battles of the world’s most powerful nation.

But the scandal now roiling Washington underscores how Ukraine’s own domestic struggles, feuds and dysfunctions have shaped the controversy — and shows how the pursuit of political advantage by actors in each country fed the other in ways that neither side foresaw.

Mr. Lutsenko’s path to Mr. Giuliani began in this political morass, with a meeting so combative that it helped ignite the scandal in the first place.

Shortly after taking up her post in 2016, the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, went to meet the new prosecutor general, Mr. Lutsenko, in his office — and complained that his deputies were stained by corruption, according to two Ukrainian officials familiar with the encounter.

The ambassador then pressed Mr. Lutsenko further, the officials said, asking him to stop investigating anti-corruption activists who were supported by the American Embassy and had criticized his work.

Mr. Lutsenko said he snapped at Ms. Yovanovitch that “no one is going to dictate to me” who should be investigated, prompting the ambassador to storm out of the meeting.

“This moment was, how shall we say, not very positive,” recalled Larisa Sagan, Mr. Lutsenko’s assistant at the time. “There were always difficult relations with the U.S. ambassador.”

In the months to come — as the ambassador stepped up her criticism of Ukraine’s faltering efforts to root out corruption — Mr. Lutsenko’s personal animus toward Ms. Yovanovitch grew. He concluded, he and his former colleagues say, that he needed to go around her and find a direct path to a more receptive audience: Mr. Trump’s inner circle.

When Mr. Giuliani learned that Mr. Lutsenko and other disgruntled Ukrainian officials were trying to reach out to the Americans, he welcomed the opportunity.

“Yeah, I probably called, I’m sure I called — Lutsenko didn’t have my number,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview.

According to notes of their January meetings given to members of Congress last week, Mr. Lutsenko told Mr. Giuliani about what he called payments to Hunter Biden, who sat on the board of the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.

The two also discussed the theory that Paul Manafort — Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager, who had been convicted in the United States of fraud for his work as a consultant in Ukraine — had been set up by supporters of Hillary Clinton. Ukrainian officials deny such claims, and no evidence supports this idea.

Mr. Lutsenko said he met Mr. Giuliani to seek help recovering billions of dollars he said were stolen from Ukraine under a previous government, a matter unrelated to the American election.

But veterans of Ukraine’s cutthroat politics say Mr. Lutsenko’s outreach to Mr. Trump’s inner circle was a clear attempt to win favor with a powerful ally at a time his own political future looked uncertain.

“Lutsenko was trying to save his political skin by pretending to be Trumpist at the end of his career,” said David Sakvarelidze, a former deputy prosecutor general.

Instead of finding salvation, Mr. Lutsenko was fired in late August by Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Mr. Lutsenko left Ukraine for Britain last Sunday, saying he wanted to improve his English. On Tuesday, Ukrainian authorities announced that they had opened a criminal case against him over accusations that he had abused his power in dealings with politicians and others involved in illegal gambling.

Mr. Lutsenko dismissed the latest case as “a big fantasy.” But to many in Ukraine, it is a fitting coda to the career of an ambitious politician turned prosecutor who used his position to wage political battles.

Even his initial appointment caused controversy: He became prosecutor general in 2016 only after Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro O. Poroshenko, got Parliament to remove a requirement that the prosecutor be educated in the law.

A survivor in Ukraine’s often treacherous politics, Mr. Lutsenko had spent time in jail as a political prisoner, won a seat in Ukraine’s Parliament and served as interior minister, holding senior positions under three presidents.

He also showed himself an adept operator in the United States.

After his meetings with Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Lutsenko provided grist for a series of articles in The Hill, a Washington news portal. His remarks were pitch-perfect in their appeal to Mr. Trump and his supporters.

Mr. Trump tweeted the headline of one of the articles: “As Russia Collusion Fades, Ukrainian Plot to Help Clinton Emerges.”

In another article, Mr. Lutsenko aired his feud with Ms. Yovanovitch, the American ambassador, asserting that she had given him a list of untouchables not to prosecute. The claim set off a storm of accusations that the ambassador belonged to a cabal working to hurt Mr. Trump and protect the Bidens.

The State Department dismissed Mr. Lutsenko’s claim as “an outright fabrication,” and he later acknowledged that the “don’t prosecute list” never existed. In the interview, he blamed the misstep on a bad translation and insisted that Ms. Yovanovitch had, in fact, pressed him not to prosecute anticorruption activists.

But the damage was done. Already under fire from some Republicans, who said she had disparaged Mr. Trump in private meetings, Ms. Yovanovitch was ordered in May to leave her post in Kiev and return to Washington.

When Mr. Lutsenko’s name appeared in a whistle-blower complaint released last week — which accused Mr. Trump of soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 election — the former prosecutor dismissed the account as “filled with multiple lies.”

But in private messages to a Ukrainian anti-corruption campaigner, Mr. Lutsenko gloated about one important part of the complaint: his role in ending Ms. Yovanovitch’s career in Kiev.

In the exchange — with Daria Kaleniuk, the head of Ukraine’s Anticorruption Action Center — Mr. Lutsenko used mafia slang to rejoice at how the American ambassador’s removal had undercut activists campaigning against corruption in Ukraine. Mr. Lutsenko told Ms. Kaleniuk that he had “eliminated your roof.”

“Roof,” a term derived from Russian mafia slang, is used throughout the former Soviet Union to designate a protector or guardian. The “roof” in this instance, Ms. Kaleniuk said, was Ambassador Yovanovitch.

“Lutsenko hated Yovanovitch,” Ms. Kaleniuk said.

To Western diplomats who have followed Ukraine’s turbulent history since it broke free from the Soviet Union in 1991, Mr. Lutsenko was a familiar figure: a seemingly reform-minded politician who, once given power, deeply disappointed his former admirers by displaying many of the ills he had previously denounced.

He had helped organize the street protests that toppled Ukraine’s deeply corrupt, pro-Russian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, in 2014, meeting with journalists to explain his vision of a Western-oriented country ruled by laws instead of political diktats.

Soon after his appointment as prosecutor general in 2016, however, he began feuding with other law enforcement agencies, notably the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, a body set up in 2014 with strong support from the Obama administration.

The anti-corruption bureau investigated previously untouchable tycoons and politicians, including several of Mr. Lutsenko’s subordinates. These actions — and the praise they received from Ms. Yovanovitch — infuriated Mr. Lutsenko, reinforcing his animosity toward the ambassador and his determination to put the rival agency in its place.

In one particularly high-profile clash, Mr. Lutsenko torpedoed a secret 2017 investigation by the anti-corruption bureau, which had been looking into a passport-for-sale racket run by immigration officials. Mr. Lutsenko posted pictures of undercover agents on the internet, and the case collapsed.

“For this alone he should go to jail,” said Anatoly S. Hrytsenko, a former Ukrainian minister of defense.

Even before he found an ally in Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Lutsenko, his relations with American diplomats in Kiev in tatters, had sought to curry favor directly with the Trump administration.

The effort started in earnest in early 2018, when he tried to shelve criminal cases in Ukraine against Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager, Mr. Manafort, who had made millions of dollars in Kiev as a consultant.

His decision to freeze the Manafort cases came as the Trump administration was completing plans to sell Ukraine a type of sophisticated anti-tank missile called the Javelin. The maneuver hinted at a dynamic now pivotal to the impeachment inquiry — whether the Trump administration, or the president himself, traded security aid for political favors.

Later in 2018, an official in Mr. Lutsenko’s office, Kostiantyn Kulyk — one of the deputies Ms. Yovanovitch had asked Mr. Lutsenko to dismiss at their first meeting — came up with another idea, according to a senior Ukrainian law enforcement official.

Mr. Kulyk had compiled a seven-page dossier on Hunter Biden — a potential way of reaching officials in Washington who had been blocked by Mr. Lutsenko’s testy relations with the American Embassy in Kiev, the official said.

In March, Mr. Kulyk moved to restart the criminal case against the owner of the gas company that had recruited Hunter Biden to sit on its board. But Mr. Kulyk was under a cloud himself: The anti-corruption bureau had investigated him on suspicion of illicit enrichment. Mr. Kulyk did not respond to requests for an interview.

Mr. Lutsenko was confronting a problem of his own. His political patron, President Poroshenko, got trounced in a presidential election in April.

The defeat meant Mr. Lutsenko risked losing his job. While largely discredited in Ukraine as a political operative who had put much of his energy into personal fights, like the one with Ms. Yovanovitch, Mr. Lutsenko still had one significant base of support: Mr. Giuliani and the American president himself.

When Mr. Trump spoke by phone on July 25 with Ukraine’s new president, Mr. Trump complained about the expected departure of Ukraine’s prosecutor, an apparent reference to Mr. Lutsenko.

“I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair,” Mr. Trump told Ukraine’s new president, Mr. Zelensky. “A lot of people are talking about that.”

Mr. Lutsenko lost his job anyway, leaving his post a month later.

Mr. Lutsenko “was a very big disappointment,” said Ms. Kaleniuk, the anti-corruption activist. “He decided he couldn’t change the system, or didn’t want to change it.”

His feud with the American ambassador and his outreach to the Trump administration, she added, were all part of a bigger problem — the mixing of politics and justice — that has afflicted Ukraine for years.

In a sign of how perilous this mix can be, even Mr. Giuliani is now shunning the former prosecutor, denouncing him as “corrupted.”

In the interview in London, Mr. Lutsenko said that he told Mr. Giuliani from the start that there was no basis for a case against Mr. Biden or his son.

“Sometimes the mayor is very wise, but sometimes he gets carried away,” he said of Mr. Giuliani.

Asked about this on Friday, Mr. Giuliani had a simple retort: “Liar.”

Andrew E. Kramer and Andrew Higgins reported from Kiev, Ukraine, and Michael Schwirtz from London. Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting from Washington, and Maria Varenikova from Kiev