Tipsheet

CNN Panel: Hunter Biden's Ukrainian Gig 'Doesn’t Look Good' for Democrats

A CNN panel on Monday explained how Hunter Biden deciding to join the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his dad, Joe Biden, was vice president is problematic for the Democrats.  

Anchor John King said on "Inside Politics" that while there is no evidence to prove Vice President Biden pressured Ukrainians to fire a prosecutor that was investigating the company his son was a part of, "because his son was, as many other people in Washington are, a consultant, who if his name were Hunter Smith or Hunter Doe, he might not have had the access that he had."

King then asked Paul Kane, a senior congressional reporter for The Washington Post, how big of a problem Hunter's arrangement is for Biden's campaign.

"So far, from what everybody has done in terms of reporting, they've not uncovered anything that looks actually illegal. But it looks like that old standard definition of Washington: What’s legal is really what’s troubling to people," Kane said.

"So he got hired, got put on the board of this gas company, and as you said, if his name was Hunter Walker, would he have done so? So that doesn’t look good in this moment of where Democrats, especially, are fighting back against sort of corporate interests," he added.

Kate Bedingfield, the deputy campaign manager and communications director for Biden's campaign, was asked by CNN on Monday if Biden regrets not telling Hunter to not take the job, if for no other reason than for the bad optics.

"No, because he didn’t do anything wrong. And, you know, the White House said in 2014 that there was no issue with Hunter having that job," Bedingfield said.

"But, you know, and I think that asking this question is exactly, Alisyn, what Donald Trump wants, right? There’s no evidence, as you stipulated at the top, which is important, there’s no evidence that he did anything wrong, and yet he still hopes that you guys will ask questions like that, that you will try to insinuate that there was an optical issue, that there was some kind of, you know, that there’s some kind of issue there that wasn’t there," she added.