Joe Biden appears to have been uncomfortable with his son’s involvement with Burisma; in a New Yorker profile, Hunter recalled his father saying, “I hope you know what you are doing.” Hunter said they never spoke further about the issue; Biden has made a point of not talking to his son about his business dealings.

It’s not hard to imagine why Biden didn’t press Hunter. The Biden boys and their father had been through hell together. Hunter has said his first memory was waking up in the hospital next to his older brother, Beau, after the car crash that killed their mother and baby sister. He grew up to be a troubled man, his life pockmarked by addiction and failure.

Beau died of brain cancer a few months before Biden traveled to Ukraine to push the government to crack down on corruption. It’s not shocking that, at a moment when his family was consumed by grief, Biden wasn’t inclined to confront his surviving son.

But even if you’re not inclined to empathize with Biden — even if you assume the worst about him — Trump’s conspiracy theory makes no sense. To believe it, you’d have to first believe that the foreign affairs apparatus of the Obama administration was willing to put its credibility on the line in service of the black sheep of the Biden family. After all, Joe Biden wasn’t freelancing in Ukraine; he was carrying out White House policy.

Further, if the Trump administration truly believes that Obama’s Ukraine policy was crooked, one might ask why it has Pyatt, who helped accomplish that policy, representing America as ambassador to Greece.

Most important, getting rid of Shokin made an investigation of Burisma more likely, not less. “He didn’t want to investigate Burisma,” the Ukrainian anti-corruption activist Daria Kaleniuk told The Washington Post. “Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.”

However bad the optics around Hunter Biden, Joe Biden was not serving his son’s interests. If anything, they were working at cross-purposes.