Joe Biden Owes the American Public Answers About Russia

It is impossible to argue that federal government officials did not abuse their powers to launch the Russia collusion investigation against the Trump campaign. The question becomes, how much did Joe Biden know about the politicization of the intelligence process and did he encourage it? Joe Biden wants to avoid these questions about Russia and has been dodging difficult interviews for months.

Gerard Baker writes in the Wall Street Journal:

“It’s well past time Mr. Biden was asked some hard questions about what he knew about the campaign by the administration he worked in to paint Mr. Trump as an asset of Russian intelligence.

When he digitally tiptoes out from his Delaware fastness, the former vice president is typically tossed some gentle softballs from friends at MSNBC, CNN or some other group of Democratic Party activists.

The latest information adds to the mound of evidence that there was serious malfeasance by officials inside the Obama administration. Here’s what we’ve learned in the past couple of weeks alone:

• At an August 2016 intelligence briefing, given for the ostensible purpose of informing candidate Trump about Russian interference in the election, an FBI official was present to gather intelligence on the Trump campaign.

• In February 2017, even as it continued to pursue investigations of Trump officials on multiple levels, the FBI had acknowledged it had no evidence to support the central claim of its inquiry: that Trump team members had worked with the Kremlin.

• The primary source for the infamous Steele dossier on Mr. Trump was a Washington-based Ukrainian émigré and think-tank scholar, not some high-level Russian informant.

All this comes on top of what Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, discovered late last year: FBI officials doctored information to get judges to approve Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants and ignored or played down evidence that undermined their investigation. All the while, officials leaked damaging and selective information to friendly media to convince the country they were on to something.

We know Mr. Biden was kept abreast of aspects of the investigation. He took part in a January 2017 Oval Office meeting that discussed a taped phone call between Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador a week earlier. We know that his boss wanted to be told everything the FBI investigators were doing. We know that Susan Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser and a leading contender for Mr. Biden’s vice presidential pick, was also closely involved in reviewing aspects of the FBI’s activities.

What else did Mr. Biden know? When did he first learn about the investigation? Did he receive information from that August 2016 briefing-cum-eavesdropping operation the FBI conducted with the Trump campaign? Did he press for the prosecution of Mr. Flynn? There are many more questions to be asked of a presidential candidate about what he can recall of such a critical period in recent history.”

The media needs to begin hounding Biden until he answers difficult questions about his involvement in the intelligence community’s witch hunt of President Trump.