Chris Truax

Opinion columnist

President Donald Trump has a thing for conspiracy theories. It was bad enough when he was, we all assumed, cynically spreading them in an effort to manipulate people. But his efforts to get Ukraine to dig into an absurd theory about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden suggest he may actually believe them, which is worse.

The one about Biden isn’t even a proper conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory takes a few well-known facts and tries to create a colorful story by filling in the “gaps” with wild speculations.

But Trump's "theory” couples made-up “facts” with nonsensical leaps of “logic.” It makes no sense even if you assume the made-up parts are true. To judge by the way it has been presented on TV, it seems mostly to consist of shouting “Hunter Biden!” and “$50,000 a month!” over and over again.

Apparently, Trump believes that Biden, while vice president, used the U.S. government to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired, supposedly to benefit his son Hunter. The president's allies have called this supposed plot “extortion.”

Roy Cohn would be proud of Trump

Trying to have a logical discussion of all this is a little like trying to nail jello to the wall with a tennis shoe. Let's start with what actually did happen.

There is no doubt that Hunter Biden has issues and has struggled with various forms of addiction. There is also no doubt that Hunter Biden is Joe Biden’s greatest personal vulnerability. Hunter and Joe are the last survivors of the Biden family that never was. Trump has tried to exploit this vulnerability by throwing out baseless, even ridiculous charges that would have made his mentor, mob lawyer and McCarthy hearings architect Roy Cohn, proud. It should make everyone else slightly nauseous.

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Back in spring 2014, Hunter Biden and a couple of other people, including the ex-president of Poland, were invited to join the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company. For being on the board and, apparently, doing some other work, Hunter Biden earned up to $50,000 a month. He left the Burisma board when his five-year term expired this year.

In December 2015, Vice President Biden delivered a message to Ukraine officials, letting them know that the U.S. government would hold up $1 billion in loan guarantees unless Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin was sacked. In spring 2016, Shokin was forced to resign.

At this point, I could describe how Shokin, as a Ukrainian deputy prosecutor, had refused to cooperate with a United Kingdom investigation into corruption by Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma Holdings. I could discuss how, after Shokin was elevated to the post of prosecutor general, every member of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations, including the U.S. government, along with the International Monetary Fund and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, began agitating to get rid of him.

But perhaps most telling is how Shokin was viewed by many Ukrainians. Here’s how a Ukrainian newspaper described his removal: "The reports came shortly after Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he’d asked his appointed prosecutor, who has failed to bring a single major criminal case to trial in a year, to leave. ... Shokin has been under fire for months by his critics, who accused him of stalling reform in the Prosecutor General’s Office, and covering up cases of corruption among his subordinates."

Fired prosecutor helped Burisma

In short, Shokin was doing nothing to combat corruption. If there was something fishy going on at Burisma Holdings, the very worst thing that could have happened, from company owner Zlochevsky’s point of view, was replacing Shokin. This was the compliant prosecutor who had saved him $23 million by refusing to cooperate with the U.K. corruption investigation. The idea that removing Shokin somehow protected Burisma Holdings and Hunter Biden is absurd on its face.

Even more ridiculous, all this assumes Biden actually had the ability to get Shokin fired. American vice presidents are both notoriously and constitutionally powerless. Unless there happens to be a tie vote in the Senate, they could spend their entire time in office on the beach and no one would notice, with the possible exception of dead foreign dignitaries whose funerals they are often forced to attend. On their best days, they are errand boys for the president.

Biden could no more order $1 billion in loan guarantees withheld from Ukraine than he could flap his arms and fly to the moon. In fact, Biden acknowledges that in the very sound bite that contains Trump's false claim in the July 25 phone call to the Ukrainian president that "Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution." Biden was actually bragging about pressuring the Ukrainians to fire Shokin. The former vice president recounted last year that the Ukrainians told him, "You have no authority. You're not the president." Biden's response: "Call him."

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The idea of firing Shokin started in the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv in 2015 and had the backing of the Obama administration and many of its allies. It simply wasn’t Biden’s decision to make.

Finally, and most critically, none of this matters. Trump may have suspected Joe Biden of corruption, but when the president pressured a foreign government to investigate an American citizen and political rival, he engaged in actual corruption. Whatever Biden did or didn’t do can’t excuse that. President Trump sees nothing wrong with all this. In fact, he is proud of what he has done. The question now is, are we?

Chris Truax, an appellate lawyer in San Diego, is an adviser to Republicans for the Rule of Law and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.