Joe Biden’s recent surge in the Democratic primary has revived his White House hopes and, with them, the Senate GOP’s interest in using their power to dig into his son Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine.The desire for dirt on the Bidens was what prompted House Democrats to impeach President Donald Trump, after it was revealed he was leveraging military aid to Ukraine as part of his efforts. But as Biden seemed to fade from contention during the early voting contests, interest in Hunter Biden’s time on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma seemed to fade among Trump and Republicans too. That’s now changed. On the heels of Biden’s string of primary wins on Tuesday, GOP lawmakers are teeing up letters and subpoenas for new information on the Bidens. And they’re offering up a fresh explanation for why the push is justified: they’re just vetting the guy for the benefit of Democratic primary voters.“If he is in fact the frontrunner for the Democratic nominee to be president of the United States,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), “all the more reason to get to the bottom of it, and make sure that the people have all the information that they need to make an informed decision on the person that would be president of the United States.”The de facto leader of the Biden investigations, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), told reporters on Wednesday that Biden has not “adequately answered” questions about his family’s involvement in Ukraine, despite no actual evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the former VP. “[I]f I were a Democrat primary voter, I’d want these questions satisfactorily answered before I cast my final vote,” he said.Trump’s Big Lie About Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and Ukraine Falls ApartOn Monday, Johnson announced that the Senate oversight panel, which he chairs, would be moving forward with a subpoena for documents and testimony related to Hunter Biden’s service on the board of Burisma. And in the same breath he raised unanswered questions about the Bidens, the Wisconsin senator insisted that going after them was not his intention. “My investigations are not focused on the Bidens,” he said. “They just aren’t. But I can’t ignore them, because they’re part of the story. They made themselves part of the story... they made themselves part of this issue of legitimate investigation.”The idea that Republican lawmakers are providing a public service to Democratic primary voters was treated as absurd by Democrats on Wednesday. Instead, they saw the renewed interest in Hunter Biden and Burisma as a not-particularly-subtle attempt to tar Joe Biden by association—raising questions about his integrity that don’t need to be asked right as the general election is approaching. “Get ready,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who has traveled with Johnson to Ukraine on several occasions. “The Senate is going to turn into an arm of the Trump campaign. I don’t think we’ve expected anything different. The President is willing to use all the official powers at his disposal to try to destroy his political rivals. The Senate Republicans gave him a pass on that, and thus it stands to reason they would attempt to do some version of the same thing.”The president’s allies allege that Biden, when he was vice president, corruptly endeavored to protect his son Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine by working to oust a Ukrainian prosecutor who was looking into corruption at Burisma. But that prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, had put those investigations aside. And while much was made by Republicans of Biden’s push to get rid of him, the Obama administration and U.S. allies wanted to see him gone, too, because he was seen as insufficiently committed to fighting corruption. Democrats Left Joe Biden for Dead. Then They Decided He Was Their SaviorNeither U.S. nor Ukrainian officials ever filed criminal charges against the Bidens, and the former Ukrainian prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, said in May 2019 that there was no evidence of wrongdoing. The Bidens themselves have denied wrongdoing, too. “We already knew that Donald Trump is terrified of facing Joe Biden—because he got himself impeached by trying to force a foreign country to spread lies about the Vice President on behalf of his re-election campaign,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign. “Now, Senator Johnson just flat out conceded that this is a ham-handed effort to manipulate Democratic primary voters.”President Trump himself remains closely in touch with some of the most central figures off Capitol Hill trying to trigger investigations of the Biden family and Ukraine. On Wednesday, the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani told The Daily Beast that he was still in regular contact with Trump. Asked when the two of them last spoke, the Trump attorney replied, “yesterday”—the same day Biden dominated Super Tuesday’s Democratic contests and dramatically improved his chances of securing the party’s 2020 presidential nomination. Giuliani would not divulge the nature or subject matter of their Tuesday conversation. But the former New York mayor and leading Biden antagonist had previously vowed, following Trump’s acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial, to continue to probe the Bidens and Ukraine issues.As The Daily Beast reported last month, Giuliani has done so at the explicit encouragement of his client, with Trump, post-acquittal, privately urging his attorney to keep digging on the matter and to keep the president updated on whatever progress he makes.In early February, Giuliani said he was planning on “ramping up” his probes into Joe and Hunter Biden, claiming that “it’s a matter of the fair administration of justice for real.”In the Senate, that ramping-up was timed nicely with Biden’s reemergence in the Democratic race. On Sunday, the day after Biden’s comeback win in the South Carolina primary, Johnson sent a letter to members of his committee notifying them of plans to hold a vote on a subpoena for Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat who worked for a consulting firm, Blue Star Strategies, that represented Burisma in the U.S. GOP Base Is Hot to Probe Biden, Senate Republicans Not So MuchIn his letter, Johnson wrote that he is “convinced obtaining Mr. Telizhenko’s Blue Star documents and information is an important part of this investigation.” Telizhenko, reported The Daily Beast in November, has ties to Trumpworld figures like Rudy Giuliani, and helped spread the narrative popular among the president’s allies that Ukrainian officials meddled in the 2016 election to hurt Trump.A vote on the subpoena is scheduled for Mar. 11. If approved, it will be the first subpoena issued by Senate Republicans for anything related to Burisma. Asked to respond to allegations of fishy timing, Johnson scoffed. “They’re just wrong,” he said on Wednesday.The top Democrat on Johnson’s committee, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), declined to say to reporters if he felt that the probe is politically motivated. He did oppose it, however, on the grounds it was a waste of time: “This investigation should not be part of what we're doing at Homeland Security,” said Peters. “There are too many other important issues that impact the security of our country.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

While Super Tuesday left the Democrats with a pair of front-runners whom President Donald Trump believes he can define and defeat, there are still some private worries in the White House. There is concern that the Democrats' messy nomination contest may end up producing an emboldened version of the very man who once worried Trump so much as a foe that it led to the president's impeachment.

Senate Republicans allege their probe of the Biden family has nothing to do with the 2020 election — and also that it totally does.After former Vice President Joe Biden rounded up several Super Tuesday states and secured a delegate lead in race for the Democratic nomination, Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) delivered an update on his party's investigation into Biden's son Hunter Biden. Johnson said he'd release an "interim report" on the probe within the next one to two months, apparently to help Democratic primary voters make their choice, Politico's Andrew Desiderio reports.Senate Republicans have been probing Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine ever since the impeachment trial of President Trump ended without a conviction. This probe and its subsequent report aren't intended to influence the election, Johnson said before pulling a total 180 and saying "if I were a Democrat primary voter, I'd want these questions satisfactorily answered before I cast my final vote."> “These are questions that Joe Biden has never adequately answered,” Johnson tells us.> > — Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) March 4, 2020Just on Tuesday, Johnson told his committee he was considering subpoenaing documents related to Hunter Biden's work on the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, Reuters reported. That suggestion came without any clear reason, except the fact that the former vice president had just won South Carolina's Democratic primary.More stories from theweek.com It's 2020 and women are exhausted Could Democrats win the battle against Trump but lose the war against Trumpism? Warren isn't endorsing a 2020 candidate just yet

Trump administration’s lack of transparency can make problem worse by sowing mistrust and can ‘endanger the public’ * Coronavirus news – live updatesTwo days before Larry Kudlow was announced as a member of the White House taskforce on coronavirus, the director of the National Economic Council declared coronavirus “contained” in the US, despite a plethora of data that suggested it was not.“I won’t say airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight,” Kudlow told CNBC, swaddling himself in a comforting narrative that was probably destroyed in his first meeting with the taskforce.Kudlow’s public statements on the level of threat to the US posed by the virus outbreak sit uneasily in the minds of health experts warning of its severity, but they probably rested far more peacefully in the White House, where the favored message seems to be: there is nothing to see here.There have been seven deaths from coronavirus in Washington state and many more positive cases are expected in the US, prompting public health experts to warn that honest, measured communication is of the utmost importance.But that has not been the case with the Trump administration’s response so far, which has been marked by late action, delays, a lack of resourcing on tests, attacks on Democrats for warning of the seriousness of the crisis and, critics say, a politicized emphasis on placating the political concerns of the occupant of the Oval Office, rather than pursuing effective virus containment policy.Michael Carome, director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen, a not-for-profit consumer advocacy organization, said if the government’s response was not transparent, it could make the problem worse by sowing mistrust.“People may do things that undermine the public health response to it because they may not believe what the government is saying, they may not follow instructions for how they protect themselves and respond to disruptions that may result,” Carome said.Carome also drew a line between Trump’s communication style – which is often brash, unreliable and incoherent – to the traditionally measured, fact-based style of health experts.Last week, a senior health department official alleged that she was retaliated against after raising concerns that staff had been sent to assist Americans evacuated from China because of coronavirus without proper training or appropriate protective gear.“If efforts are being made to muzzle them, to control messaging so that it suits the political needs of the administration, that’s ultimately going to endanger the public,” Carome said.The nation’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, hinted that publicly discussing facts while keeping the president happy was easier said than done.“You should never destroy your own credibility,” Fauci, told Politico. “And you don’t want to go to war with a president. But you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you continue to tell the truth.”For 35 years, Fauci has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health. He said he was not being muzzled from speaking about the coronavirus outbreak – which he does not expect the US to escape “unscathed” – but that he has been told to run interviews past the vice-president’s office for clearance.Fauci was one of several top public health officials reportedly told to run their messaging past Pence, after a CDC official warned the spread of coronavirus was inevitable.The CDC’s announcement triggered a dramatic response from the media and public health officials across the US, but Trump insisted everything was fine.Last week, Trump tweeted: “Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.” He has repeatedly claimed warmer weather will cause coronavirus to disappear, though it is too early to know if that’s true. The day after the CDC said coronavirus’s spread was inevitable, the president said it wasn’t.Over the weekend, he said Democrats were politicizing the crisis, and compared it to impeachment as their latest “hoax”.Political appointees of the Trump administration, and the president’s children, have lined up to defend Trump’s response.The acting white house chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, told people to turn off the television and ignore media reports about the virus last week.Mulvaney said the media had started paying attention to coronavirus because “they think this is going to be what brings down the president”. He did not mention the increased attention came days after the CDC declared coronavirus’s spread in the US was inevitable.“When politics starts to get into the conversation, then people might start to feel they need to take a side and they might start filtering public health information through a partisan lens,” said Nathan Myers, associate professor in the political science department at Indiana State University.If a health crisis is seen as a political issue, it can affect support for emergency funding to fight the outbreak and policies meant to stem its spread.Myers highlighted how only Democrats signed on to a congressional letter asking for more information about faulty coronavirus test kits distributed by the CDC, a demonstrable problem that has even been raised by a few conservative media commentators.“Oversight over something like a public health emergency should very much be a bipartisan thing,” Myers said. “Republicans can ask for information about these kinds of topics without attacking the administration or attacking the president.”Myers’s book Pandemics and Polarization examined how a Republican-held Congress’s distrust of Barack Obama’s administration affected the government’s response to the Zika virus. Months before the 2016 presidential election, Republicans held up $1.1bn in funding to the outbreak by inserting provisions that would restrict funding to Planned Parenthood and reverse a ban on flying the Confederate flag at veterans’ cemeteries.“This is why people hate Congress,” Senator Tim Kaine said at the time.One of the few serious bipartisan efforts to emerge during the coronavirus outbreak is legislation to create automatic funding to respond to public health emergencies, much like existing processes to respond to natural disasters.“That’s almost saying we don’t think Congress can be bipartisan enough to come together on these supplemental funding bills so we need to have a preparedness fund in place so it takes the politics out of the situation,” Myers said.Despite a wave of support from Republican lawmakers, there has been pushback to Trump’s subdued messaging in the conservative magazine National Review. The writer Michael Brendan Dougherty said: “The wrong Donald Trump has shown up to deal with the coronavirus.”Noting that Trump is a germaphobe who has been critical of China, Dougherty writes that instead “we’re getting Trump the market whisperer. We’re getting a Trump who is obviously bothered by the drop in the Dow Jones. We’re getting a Trump who plans to campaign on the conventional measures of success favored by his predecessors. We’re getting a Trump who is downplaying the seriousness of this disease, who is probably acting too late, and who is making promises he can’t keep.”The National Review editor, Rich Lowry, was also critical of the administration’s decision to downplay the outbreak.“By pooh-poohing worries about the virus and saying everything is under control, it is setting itself up for the charge, if things get even a little bad, that it was self-deluding and overly complacent,” Lowry wrote. “It will be accused of making mission-accomplished statements before the mission truly began.”Those articles were missing from a missive the White House sent Monday night to reporters with subject line “Praise for the President’s Coronavirus Response”.The message linked to tweets from lawmakers and three editorials in two right-leaning newspapers applauding the president.

(Bloomberg) -- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s popularity has taken a hit, but it’s his prime minister who’s paid the price.Premier Oleksiy Honcharuk was the chief casualty of a cabinet reshuffle that also envisages a new finance minister. The departure of Honcharuk -- who was replaced by his 44-year-old deputy, Denys Shmyhal -- was overwhelmingly approved Wednesday by parliament.The shakeup marks a change of tack for Zelenskiy less than a year after he picked a government stacked with fresh faces to break free from the country’s notoriously corrupt post-Soviet politics. Honcharuk, 35, was installed as Ukraine’s youngest-ever prime minister to oversee an ambitious economic reboot.Things haven’t gone according to plan, however. The pace of economic expansion has plunged and billions of dollars in international aid have been held up, with the government’s poor performance dragging down Zelenskiy’s own ratings.That’s compounded a baptism by fire for the former TV comic, who months into his presidency found himself center stage in Donald Trump’s impeachment and negotiating face-to-face with Vladimir Putin over the Kremlin-backed war in Ukraine’s east.The president is a “mirror of public opinion,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta research institute in Kyiv. “He feels the discontent. He understands that, unfortunately, his bet on rookie politicians unlike their predecessors hasn’t yielded results.”Zelenskiy can’t blame everything on the government.It’s his own ties to billionaire Igor Kolomoisky that have raised eyebrows among investors. Weighing a now long-delayed $5.5 billion loan, the International Monetary Fund frets about the tycoon’s efforts to undo the nationalization of Ukraine’s biggest bank, which he used to own.Criminal charges for the alleged fraud that prompted the state’s takeover are yet to arrive.And the fear is that in turning to old-guard politicians -- Ihor Umanskyi, the replacement for respected Finance Minister Oksana Markarova, served in governments in 2009 and 2014-2015 -- Zelenskiy is extinguishing voters’ hopes of a new start.Oleksandr Kornienko, the president’s party chief, said before the changes were announced that incoming officials would need experience managing state-run or private businesses.Shmyhal, for instance, was deputy head of an energy company owned by Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, until last year, and also briefly managed the western region of Ivano-Frankivsk.But the reshuffle doesn’t mark the end of the “new faces philosophy,” according to Kornienko.“Trust in the president remains, and there’s trust in his economic and social program,” he said. “We have very nice goals for the government but in some spheres it’s been chaotic.”In the end, Honcharuk’s missteps -- which also include an unpopular farmland reform and a failure to bring down household utility costs -- were too much. Economic growth is less than a third of Zelenskiy’s 5% target and risks abound, most recently from the first case of coronavirus.Having rejected a previous request by Honcharuk to resign, Zelenskiy hasn’t been so forgiving this time round.(Updates with parliament approving new PM in second paragraph.)To contact the reporters on this story: Daryna Krasnolutska in Kyiv at dkrasnolutsk@bloomberg.net;Volodymyr Verbyany in Kiev at vverbyany1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrea Dudik at adudik@bloomberg.net, Andrew Langley, Balazs PenzFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

President Trump on Monday withdrew the nomination of Elaine McCusker to a senior Pentagon post, after reports that she had questioned the suspension of military aid to Ukraine, a key element in the inquiry leading to Trump's impeachment.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday withdrew the nomination of Elaine McCusker to a senior Pentagon post, after reports that she had questioned the suspension of military aid to Ukraine, a key element in the inquiry leading to Trump's impeachment. Withdrawal of McCusker's nomination to be under secretary of defense (comptroller), made in November, was announced by the White House in a statement. The decision, following the ouster of several other officials who testified in the impeachment inquiry, was criticized by Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

With Republicans fully embracing the president, Democrats say they have few options in their arsenal.

Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, a fierce critic of President Donald Trump who had pushed early for his impeachment, abandoned his bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination on Saturday after trailing in third place in the South Carolina primary, a campaign source told Reuters. Steyer, who poured hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money into his quest, dropped out of the race on the day of his strongest showing yet in a 2020 Democratic nominating contest. "Honestly, I can't see a path where I can win the presidency," Steyer told supporters in South Carolina.

At the grassroots conservative gathering after fronting a coronavirus briefing, the president was back in his happy placeStop Donald Trump now, Democrats warned at his impeachment trial, or will he take on the aspect of a king.The prophecy appears to have been borne out, as the US president hands out jobs to loyalists, purges perceived enemies, pardons convicted criminals and swaggers as if with a divine right.On Saturday, addressing the biggest annual gathering of US grassroots conservatives, Trump wondered aloud at it being “sort of a miracle” he has got so much done despite all he’s been through.“Maybe it’s right there, right?” he asked, pointing to the heavens. “Thank you, God.”The crowd loved it. Trump stayed away from a sceptical Conservative Political Action Conference in 2016 but now he is its sun king. Supporters in a palatial ballroom at the National Harbour leaped to their feet, whooping and cheering, many wearing “Make America great again” and “Keep America great” caps.> They’re coming after me, and we fight them back> > Donald TrumpThey roared their approval when, like a medieval monarch who has survived a bloody insurrection, Trump vowed revenge.“They’re coming after me and we fight them back,” he said. “And now we’re going after them because we have no choice. We have to straighten out our country. But despite the best efforts of the leftwing fanatics, their scams, schemes, slanders, they’ve all been discredited, totally discredited.”He singled out James Comey, whom he fired as director of the FBI, and special counsel Robert Mueller, who led the Russia investigation, as enemies whose heads deserved to end up on metaphorical spikes.“How is Comey doing?” he asked, sardonically. “How is Bob Mueller doing? That was a great performance in Congress. ‘Raise your right hand.’ ‘What?’”There was also mention of the Utah senator Mitt Romney, who voted to convict Trump at the impeachment trial and, like a rebellious duke, was banished from CPAC this year. Trump described Romney as “lowlife” and the crowd booed lustily.The president also spoke ominously of getting rid of bad people in government who are “not people that love our country” and launched a familiar tirade against the “fake news” media.He gave little sign that he is worried about the democratic inconvenience of an election in November. Just a couple of hours after trying to muster gravitas in the White House briefing room while discussing the coronavirus, he reverted to the comfort zone of freewheeling rally style.He took delight in mocking each of his Democratic rivals.“We’ve got Sleepy Joe [Biden], we’ve got Crazy Bernie [Sanders], we’ve got Mini Mike [Bloomberg] but I think he’s out of it,” he said. “That was probably the worst debate performance in the history of presidential debates.“It just shows you can’t buy an election. I mean, there’s a point at which people say, ‘You gotta bring the goods a little bit, too.’”Trump parodied Bloomberg’s height by crouching behind the lectern and the crowd went wild, laughing ecstatically and chanting: “Four more years! Four more years!”The president said: “We hit a nerve!”He also took a swipe at Biden, the former vice-president, for a gaffe in a recent debate: “Did he just say that we killed 150 million people? That’s half of our population.”Trump even held an instant poll by asking the audience to “scream” for whether he would beat Biden or Sanders more easily. There was a significant scream for Biden but a much louder and sustained one for the democratic socialist senator from Vermont.Trump suggested Biden would be “sitting in a home” for the elderly rather than governing, whereas Sanders might be a communist. That chimed with the conference’s theme: “America vs socialism”.Of the Democrats, Trump warned darkly: “They want to take away your money, take away your choice, take away your speech, take away your guns, take away your religion, take away your history, take away your future and ultimately take away your freedom. But we will never let them do that.”In a characteristically rambling monologue, he seemed genuinely unable to comprehend how teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg beat him to the precious title of Time magazine person of the year.But he finished his speech by hugging and kissing the flag – a familiar move which elicited a huge cheer from his devoted subjects.For them, and for Trump’s loyal courtiers at the White House and on Capitol Hill, it is a case of long live the king.