Full Episode: Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 12/15/23

Franklin Foer: President Biden stalked this week by a slew of problems, domestic, foreign and, well, his son.

Unidentified Male: We've got to address the southern border as part of a national security package.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY):  My Republican colleagues know very well that Ukraine's fate is inexorably linked to our national security.

Unidentified Male:  Yes, there is disagreement about the day after Hamas.

Hunter Biden, President Biden's Son: In the depths of my addiction, I was extremely irresponsible with my finances. But to suggest that as grounds for an impeachment inquiry is beyond the absurd.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH): When a majority of the House goes on record in support of an official impeachment inquiry, I think that sends a message.

Franklin Foer: How these issues may haunt the president's re-election, next.

Good evening and welcome to WASHINGTON WEEK. I'm Frank Foer, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My boss, Jeff Goldberg, is off.

President Joe Biden found himself facing an incredible convergence of political problems this week, problems which could ultimately hinder his re-election. U.S. funding for Ukraine is on hold while the White House and Congress haggle over the details of border security. Tensions between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Biden over the war in Gaza spilled into the open. And Hunter Biden, the president's only surviving son, defied a congressional subpoena and instead offered again to testify in public in front of the Republican-led House committees investigating him. And all of this comes as the House voted along party lines to officially open its impeachment inquiry into the president.

Here to discuss this with me are Steve Inskeep, a co-host of NPR's Morning Edition, Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and the author of Tired of Winning, Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party, and Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent for NPR and a political contributor for ABC News.

I roll with the A team. Asma, I wanted to start with impeachment. Why now? What's the political imperative driving this forward?

Asma Khalid, White House Correspondent, NPR: I mean, the why now is an excellent question, in part because Republicans, at least some Republicans in Congress, had been talking and investigating impeachment charges for a long time. Ultimately, I think what they were looking for was greater legitimacy. There were concerns from the White House that you don't have an official impeachment inquiry. Now, you're seeing House Republicans say, well, we have the official legitimacy to do this.

But I also think that there is a political calculation here that Republicans want to muddy the waters. On the other side, they have a man who is most likely to be their nominee in Donald Trump, who is facing multiple charges. And I will say that there has long been a desire from some Republicans to just muddy the waters, make things confusing for voters. We've had polling, other outlets have had polling that suggest it is working. And a percentage of the population does think, in fact, some of our polling at NPR showed a majority of the electorate surveyed felt that President Biden had done something unethical in relation to his son's behavior. Largely, that's along partisan lines, but not exclusively.

Franklin Foer: But let's get to the substance, because this week, Congressman Jamie Raskin said, this isn't a who done it, it is - this is a what is it? So, the question is, Steve, what is it?

Steve Inskeep, Co-Host, NPR's Morning Edition: I think it's a fair question. If you look at four other presidential impeachments, you can say in each case that the president of the United States definitely did something, and then you could debate whether it was impeachable or convictable. Andrew Johnson fired a cabinet member in a way that he wasn’t supposed to, supposedly. Bill Clinton lied under oath. Donald Trump had the perfect phone call to Ukraine, as he called it, and then, of course, January 6th, the fourth impeachment. In each case, there was an act by a sitting president that was at the center of the debate.

In this case, it's an impeachment inquiry to find out if Joe Biden may have done something while he was not president. There's not nothing there, because Hunter Biden and Biden's brother, James, and other people around Biden have been said to cash in on his name. And they certainly have had a lot of business dealings, some of which have gone wrong or been suspicious in some way, but Republicans have yet to connect it to the president.

And when you go on the Oversight Committee's website, and they put a timeline there, which goes all the way to 2023, but there are no acts by Biden during his presidency in their own timeline.

Jonathan Karl, Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News: I mean, the astounding thing is they got every single Republican to vote to launch this inquiry. Now, look, he's not going to be impeached. I really don't see that happening with this narrow a margin. There are enough Republicans who have said that they're doing this simply to give the Congress the tools they need to investigate, to put some muscle behind the subpoena power, to allow them to investigate, which is a strange bar for an impeachment inquiry.

As Steve points out, this is not in keeping with how impeachment has been used, but they got every single Republicans, including those, and there are a handful of them who are on the record saying, look, I don't see anything.

Franklin Foer: But just keep going with that, because everybody thought a month ago or two months ago that they would struggle to bring along these Biden district Republicans, and yet they've gone along with this. Why do you think that they won't ultimately go along with an impeachment vote?

Jonathan Karl: Well, first of all, because I think that there's a question of what's actually there, and there is nothing there.

Franklin Foer: It's kind of the Seinfeld of impeachment votes, impeachment vote about nothing.

Jonathan Karl: What are they doing? They've identified that Hunter Biden did some shady things. He certainly profited off his name. He got money. He got foreign money for business dealings. He did a lot of questionable things, and he was close to his father. And he did have dinner with his father at Cafe Milano at one point.

Franklin Foer: High crime and misdemeanor, that.

Jonathan Karl:  But, I mean, I just don't see it going anywhere. And I think it -- look, Trump has been pushing for this from the beginning. I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene is close to Trump as anybody in Congress, filed the first impeachment resolution the day that Biden got sworn in as president. And Troy Nehls and other Republicans made the point, we really need to do this so that we can show that it's not just Donald Trump who was impeached. I mean, it's nakedly political here.

Franklin Foer: Yes, I'm old enough to remember the Clinton impeachment. I'm guessing some of you are too. And that felt like an event. That was something that was extraordinary. It felt historic. And now impeachment is -- they're like the cherry blossoms. They're just part of the Washington --

Asma Khalid: Every season.

Franklin Foer: Yes, exactly.

Jonathan Karl: Yes. I mean, you remember they brought the Starr report to the steps of the House, unloaded all the boxes of evidence, and then the impeachment inquiry started. I mean, it was a big deal. This is --

Steve Inskeep: There's still time. They'll work on it. They'll work on it. They'll work on it.

Franklin Foer: But what does it mean as a means of constitutional redress that impeachment is just part of this ritual of trying to embarrass your political opponents? Does that mean that it's just been defanged as a way of curbing presidential power?

Steve Inskeep: Well, it wasn't a very easy tool to use to begin with. We are in a strange environment where it is hard to see -- I mean, I don't understand how the tool would work at all. And it hasn't been used to remove a president. It's not about to be used to remove a president, and I think you're right on these terms, no.

Jonathan Karl: I mean, we hit a real high watermark with the second Trump impeachment, the trial in the Senate, where you actually had seven members of the president's party vote to impeach him. It was only the second time that you had seen a member of the president's party vote to convict in a Senate trial. The first time was Trump's first impeachment. That was just one vote, though.

Steve Inskeep: Mitch McConnell famously said impeachment is a political process and the conviction, the trial is a political question, not a legal question, and that has played out at least in the way that people have cast their votes.

Franklin Foer: So, one of the central characters in this saga, Hunter Biden, meandered onto Capitol Hill this week. And since he doesn't make very many public appearances, it's worth listening to what he had to say.

Hunter Biden: There's no evidence to support the allegations that my father was financially involved in my business because it did not happen.

Franklin Foer: Asma, what do you think President Biden is thinking when he watches a clip like that?

Asma Khalid: I have absolutely no clue. But what I will say is that the White House has been very eager to never touch any questions as they relate to Hunter Biden, whether they were about Hunter Biden's artwork, whether they're now about this, any questions, they don't.

What I will also say, though, is that they often routinely tell us in the White House is that, you know, the president loves his son very much. This is a man who has long struggled with addiction, and, look, it's his only surviving son.

And so I think many of us would say there's this constant tussle between what you emotionally want to do for your child. That being said, this is a different dynamic and that this is the president of the United States and anything his son does is going to get a lot of attention.

Jonathan Karl: And the White House has kind of, they have been very careful not to really say anything, but for a while they were saying that Joe Biden had no knowledge of his president's business dealings. And then well-known now, he wasn't involved in his president's dealings.

I mean, he clearly had knowledge. He loves his son. He's close with his son. They talk all the time now, as you might expect. Look, Hunter -- it's such a tragic case. If you read Hunter Biden's very forthcoming biography, autobiography, that he wrote, really a memoir of his addiction that came out just months after Biden became president, it goes into incredibly lurid detail about his descent into addiction.

And, I mean, this is a guy who came close to dying. In some ways, it's amazing that he survived it. And, you know, his father will do anything to stop him losing another son.

Franklin Foer: There's so much scar tissue, there's so much guilt there, and I'm sure it complicates the way that they, the White House, more specifically the president, deals with this Hunter Biden thing, which just continues to loom over things.

Steve Inskeep:  Well, it is a strange thing to reflect that the most recent revelation by the Oversight Committee appears to have been payments between father and son, because Joe Biden, prior to being president, helped him make car payments and then was being repaid by Hunter. So, where did he get the money?

But this is a kind of tragic example of what you're saying. This is a difficult family relationship with a guy who had a very difficult time, as opposed to something the president did as president.

Asma Khalid: I will say, though, as tragic as it is, I think from really like an emotional family perspective, it is nonetheless a political liability, right? I mean, the president doesn't want to be discussing his son. He doesn't want any of this. No Democrat that I've spoken to really wants to see this play out ahead as we move into the final election.

Franklin Foer: And you read these reports in Politico and other places that the White House would like to take a different approach than the one that Hunter Biden is taking, but the president has an exceedingly hard time making that case, and he doesn't really want to hear that case.

Jonathan Karl: And Hunter Biden wants to fight back against this, he believes that he has been, he and the people around him believe that he has been a victim of a political, you know, hit job. He acknowledges he's made all these mistakes. He acknowledged what you heard him acknowledge there in terms of his taxes. He was ready to plead guilty, you know, in a plea deal. Now, that that's off, he wants to fight back and wants to fight back against the people who he believes, with very good reason, are going after him because the real target is his father.

That said, he is now facing felony charges on his failure to pay taxes, felony charges that will -- you know, we will see play out amidst the presidential campaign just as we're going to see, you know, felony charges against Donald Trump.

Franklin Foer: Is there anything they can do to diffuse this? Because as Asma says, it's stuck, that there --

Asma Khalid: It’s muddying the waters. And one thing I will say is that while it was certainly, and Hunter says, right, and this is -- you hear from a lot of Democrats, is that it's being put forward to sort of poison the atmosphere and go after the president.

I will also say that more than once, on two different occasions, I have met younger voters of color who specifically cited to me Hunter's situation in saying that they felt like he was not being treated as fairly as some other. I mean, one young woman I met at the NAACP convention over the summer said there are so many young black men in jail, why should he get a pardon? Why should he get a pass? Which I think is an interesting observation of how some of this is percolating down even into fragments of the Democratic Party.

Jonathan Karl: I mean, it's really interesting, because the talking point from Biden's allies, from Hunter Biden's allies is, if his name weren't Biden, he wouldn't be prosecuted for this. He's being prosecuted for failure to pay taxes, taxes that he ultimately paid with interest plus penalties.

So that's a good point. That's not usually charged. Then, again, he wouldn't have been making millions of dollars in these foreign ventures if his name wasn't Biden either.

Franklin Foer: So, as Hunter Biden was up on Capitol Hill, so was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Steve, Zelenskyy is usually this incredible communicator who's able to speak over the heads of political leaders directly to publics. He's been so effective in making the case for himself and his country on Capitol Hill. Why has he fallen flat this time?

Steve Inskeep: Well, who is he talking to this time exactly? I had an opportunity to talk with him on an earlier visit, earlier this year. And at that time, the speaker of the House, this is a long time ago, was Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy was raising concerns about Zelenskyy, and Zelenskyy was coming to answer those concerns, to say you're concerned about corruption, I've just changed some people in my defense ministry. We're fixing that. And McCarthy came out of the meeting and said he was impressed, making me feel that McCarthy himself was, in effect, building support for Zelenskyy by going through this sort of theater of answering concerns.

I have no knowledge if the new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has the same attitude, that he would like this ultimately to be passed. And we know that there is a fair part of his caucus that has no interest whatsoever in passing more aid to Ukraine.

Jonathan Karl: I mean, it's getting to be about 50 percent of the Republicans in the House that are simply opposed to Ukraine aid. I mean, you can look at it. Some of the votes have broken down in different ways. Johnson has made it clear that he is willing to have a vote on Ukraine aid. I think that there are the votes ultimately to pass this, to get aid to Ukraine. But there's a price. And the price, of course, is a bigger deal that includes something at the border.

Franklin Foer: It's really interesting, the shift within House Republicans on Ukraine. What explains that? Do they just see the political potency of opposing the war or --

Jonathan Karl: Well, first of all, there's some very loud voices on it. I mean, for a while, it was Tucker Carlson. You remember him. He used to have a show.

Franklin Foer: I've seen him on X.

Jonathan Karl: And Donald Trump himself, I mean, Trump has become increasingly critical of aid to Ukraine. In fact, speaking of Tucker Carlson, in my book, I report about how Trump and Carlson talk all the time. And Carlson told me, I think, credibly, that Trump is much more radical on this issue that he lets on, that essentially he agrees with Tucker Carlson's position, which is essentially Vladimir Putin's position on.

Franklin Foer: Speaking of Vladimir Putin, he held his annual confab where he gets (INAUDIBLE) in front of a hall full of captive reporters, and he said this gloatingly, they're getting everything as freebies, but these freebies can run out at some point. And it looks like they're already starting to run out.

Now, Putin has always had this attitude that he can simply wait the west out. Was he essentially correct?

Asma Khalid: I think we'll see whether or not he was correct in terms of whether or not this additional funding comes through. I think that for President Biden, though, this money is more than just the Ukraine conflict. It's a matter of this is a man who came into office talking about the United States' role in the world, that democracy can be a force for good. And now you're seeing kind of this entire vision of foreign policy potentially fall apart. And I think that poses bigger questions and liabilities to Biden's entire legacy.

That all being said, I think we are seeing clear signs that this White House is willing to negotiate on things at the border potentially if it means getting additional Ukraine money.

Jonathan Karl: I mean, you can see the political appeal here to what the Republicans are saying. They're saying, why are we spending tens of billions more to Ukraine when we're not protecting our own border? Now, these are entirely different issues. But the political appeal to that argument, the border is a disaster by any measure. So --

Asma Khalid: There are Democrats in Biden's own party who want more. I mean, just today, you saw the Democratic governor of Arizona, Katie Hobbs, come out and say that she is signing an executive order to put the National Guard at Arizona's border. And she very flatly criticized the Biden administration, the federal government, for not securing the border. I heard this in reporting that I did out in Arizona.

I mean, certainly there's a segment of the Democratic Party that does not agree at all with concessions potentially being made around asylum issues, but there is also a segment of the Democratic Party and some very loud Democratic mayors who have been saying not enough is being done.

And so I think the challenge is that this is an issue that divides the Democratic Party.

Steve Inskeep: Infusing that would certainly help Biden with a lot of voters that are genuinely concerned about this issue, not just Democratic officials, but actual voters who are concerned. Of course, on the flipside of that, I mean, Republicans will have the same talking points regardless of whether Biden --

Asma Khalid: But it might be harder to run against if it's not as palpable of a problem.

Steve Inskeep: It brings to mind Bill Clinton signing welfare reform in 1996 and ending that issue as he went to re-election.

Franklin Foer: But one of the costs for him is potentially with the base of his own party, who are already inflamed over the war in Gaza. And this week, President Biden started to seem as if he was beginning to change tack in his dealings with Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government. What is your sense of the Biden administration's strategy right now?

Steve Inskeep: I see this as a kind of status update or acknowledgement of reality rather than a big shift by the president. President Biden early on, of course, was massively supportive of Israel and its right to defend itself, but also when traveling to Israel, cautioned them against responding in an extreme way that they would regret later, and even drew the analogy between Israel at this moment and the United States after 9/11 making mistakes that people would regret later.

Now, it seems to me, with his remarks at a fundraiser a few days ago, when he said that Israel is losing political support because of indiscriminate attacks that are killing civilians.

Franklin Foer: Indiscriminate bombing.

Steve Inskeep: Indiscriminate bombing. He is essentially saying, essentially saying, well, you're getting what I warned you about.

And he's not saying -- he was not actually making in those remarks, as I understood them, a moral case against what the president -- against what Israel is doing, which of course is what people who are more progressive are saying. He's making a practical or political case that you're running out of support around the world because of the way you're conducting the war, and you need to do this differently, as I kind of was hinting ever since the beginning.

Jonathan Karl: But that phrase, though, when he used indiscriminate bombing, which sounds a little bit like potential war crimes, nobody in the administration has repeated that phrase. He hasn't repeated that phrase. That's an explosive phrase that will accelerate the lack of support for Israel.

Franklin Foer: It wasn't necessarily a gaffe. It may have been a misstatement, but it does seem to clearly reflect some sort of change of tack into the administration's safety.

Asma Khalid: I mean, I was with them the next day. He was at the NIH actually giving remarks. And then after his formal remarks he was asked a question, essentially, of if he wants the Israeli military to potentially slow down, take a different tactic by the end of the year.

And his statement was that he wants them to focus more on limiting civilian casualties. He reiterated, as he has many times, that Israel has a right to defend itself, but he wants them to be focused on that, to limit civilian harm.

I agree with Steve, that I think it's a greater recognition of the reality. I also think, though, that it is a greater recognition of his domestic political reality, which is that we have seen, in survey after survey, a large percentage of his Democratic base, particularly younger voters, but also large swaths of people of color who make up a key part of the Democratic Party, showing that they have reservations about what Israel is doing, and they don't necessarily approve of how President Biden has been handling the situation.

Jonathan Karl: But Michigan.

Asma Khalid: And Michigan, of course, yes.

Jonathan Karl: I mean, a state that might determine whether or not he gets elected president again has a very large Arab-American population. And Democrats are really concerned. I mean, you have Democrats in Michigan that are saying that they are not going to vote for Biden again because of this.

Franklin Foer: But in addition to whatever political calculus the president is making over Israel and whatever tonal shift that's yielding, there's clearly substantive disagreements with the Netanyahu government that have begun to emerge this week.

Steve Inskeep: Yes, I've been thinking a lot about this. I got a chance to travel there in October and November. I spoke with Netanyahu a few weeks ago. And at that time, Netanyahu was not saying what he wanted in Gaza, only what he didn't want, which is no Hamas.

That absence of an answer is now becoming apparent, because the United States would like the Palestinian Authority to take charge, and Netanyahu definitely doesn't want that, says he does not trust the Palestinian Authority, even if it is revamped. And that has stirred this big debate.

But the thing that I've been realizing is that that debate is leaving out an important voice. This is almost a kind of old-time empire debate. What are we going to do for them? What kind of government are we going to get them to have? But there's a them there. What do the Palestinians want? And as my colleague Daniel Estrin was saying on NPR today, Palestinians are going to want, at an absolute minimum, some kind of governing structure that looks toward an independent Palestinian state.

That is going to be the bare minimum for them to accept being governed, which is the only way that this is going to be a stable situation.

Asma Khalid: Yes, and that's a big challenge. I mean, we've seen members of the Israeli government in different facets really not welcome, necessarily, publicly, that idea of the two-state solution. You hear the White House repeatedly say that this is what they want.

And when they've been asked questions about, well, how does that look, right? You've got hundreds of thousands of settlers in the West Bank. What are you going to do? Repeatedly, what we're told is that this is sort of -- they know it's going to be tough. It is not something that is going to be the next day of solution.

Franklin Foer: It feels like at a certain point there will be some -- the distance will start to grow between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu. The question is can Netanyahu afford to alienate Biden or is he just being shrewd? Is this the guy he's going to use as his foil as he tries to rescue his political career?

Jonathan Karl: I mean look at Netanyahu's own domestic problems. You know, I mean, how long is Netanyahu going to be prime minister? I mean, his -- whereas his level of support in Israel, he needs, he needs American support, he needs Biden's support, he needs to stay viable in Israel. I mean --

Franklin Foer: Unfortunately, we're going to need to leave it there, too much. Thank you to our panelists for joining us and sharing your reporting.

On Saturday's PBS News Weekend, how the Pope's reform efforts are dividing conservative American Catholics and the Vatican. 

I'm Frank Foer. Good night from Washington.