As the story around Donald Trump’s call with Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelensky spirals into a possible impeachment effort by the Democrats, the president’s messaging has remained relatively consistent: Sure, he may have mentioned Joe Biden and his son Hunter, but in doing so he did nothing wrong. (“The conversation I had was largely congratulatory...It was largely the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, creating to [sic] the corruption already in the Ukraine,” the president told reporters.) Still, Trump is known to lash out when cornered, and as Democratic lawmakers pile on in their support for impeachment, it’s likely only a matter of time before he attempts to flip the script, claiming that the corrupt one is not him, but Biden—the current 2020 Democratic front-runner.

But unlike in 2016, when Trump successfully pulled the same maneuver in the case of Hillary Clinton’s email server, Biden’s team is prepared. “You saw what happened to Hillary in 2016 with all of the ridiculous coverage about her emails,” a campaign adviser told Politico. “That’s not going to happen with us. We learned.”

To that end, the Biden camp seems to have concluded that the best way to limit the fallout from Hunter’s time on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company is to get ahead of the story, launching a series of counterattacks before the president’s narrative picks up steam, and painting the whole thing as a fringe conspiracy. “He makes the press an unwitting accomplice in spreading his lies when they don’t keep their focus on egregious abuses of power,” said Kate Bedingfield, Joe Biden’s communications director. “The smears he’s trying to spread have been universally debunked and are only true in some MAGA-land alternate universe.”

In recent days, the Biden campaign has pushed back at press coverage of the Ukraine story, criticizing lines from reporters like the New York Times’ Ken Vogul, who published a story back in May about Trumpworld’s interest in Biden’s Ukraine involvement. Specifically, the campaign produced a video negating the idea that Ukraine is, as Vogel said Friday on MSNBC, a “significant liability” for Biden—a notion Trump promoted in a Twitter video. “What Ken Vogel said is false,” the Biden video notes. On Saturday, Biden himself got into a tiff with Fox reporter Peter Doocy when Doocy asked how many times he’d discussed his son’s business interests abroad. “Ask the right questions,” Biden replied, testily. “You should be asking [Trump] the question: Why is he on the phone with a foreign leader, trying to intimidate a foreign leader?” The confrontational tone, ex-Barack Obama adviser Ben LaBolt suggested to Politico, had the added benefit of increasing Biden’s bona fides as a “fighter.” “The campaign has not had a lot of viral clips,” he said. “And this is one that will be seen by primary voters. You couldn’t script it better.”

With Democrats seemingly recoiling at any attempt by primary candidates to hit below the belt, Biden may not have to worry about the Ukraine narrative unless he makes it to the general. By that time, however, Trump will likely have developed a but her emails redux, this time tailored to make Biden seem corrupt, regardless of actual evidence. There’s no stopping that talking point from circling among right-wing media, particularly in places like Judicial Watch, a conservative activist group that made its name targeting Clinton over emailgate. Mainstream media is another matter. But Biden’s team seems to be betting it can at least force outlets to think twice about how they cover Rudy Giuliani’s witch hunt in Kiev.

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