“Somebody needs to look!” Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters on Friday—to look, that is, at Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice-President Joe Biden, and his business dealings in the Ukraine. It was the fourth day of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, and the House managers were about to wrap up the presentation of their case. Graham repeated the phrase a number of times, along with intimations that Joe Biden had only himself to blame for letting his “son hook up with the most corrupt company in the Ukraine, and turn the Ukraine into an ATM machine.” Graham noted Trump’s “insistence that somebody look at what happened” and added, “I think he’s right.”

Of course, Trump wasn’t just insisting that “somebody” investigate Hunter Biden; he was, as the evidence in the trial has shown, openly extorting the Ukrainian government to force it to announce an investigation, with three hundred and ninety-one million dollars in military aid hanging in the balance. If the President’s reëlection campaign had just hired opposition researchers, or even Rudy Giuliani, to look into the matter on their own, most likely the Senate would not now be sitting in an impeachment trial. The charge against Trump, though, is that he put a phalanx of American officials at Giuliani’s disposal and gave him what amounted to a working budget of close to four hundred million dollars in taxpayer money, without much regard for U.S. foreign policy or for any interests but his own.

That charge, abuse of power, was further strengthened on Sunday night, with reports that John Bolton, Trump’s former national-security adviser, wrote in the manuscript of a forthcoming book—and would testify—that Trump had told him of the link between the demand for investigations and military aid. More and more of Trump’s defenders have stopped denying that he did just that; instead, they say, in effect, that asking Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden was good for America, not just for Trump, and claim that Biden is the one who should testify. Some of them may believe that he would supply useful testimony. But there is an obvious effort to impose a price on Democratic calls for new witnesses, such as Bolton, who could further damage the President’s case. If nothing else, they could exact retribution by humiliating the Bidens. At Trump’s rallies now, the chant is “Where’s Hunter?”

Indeed, on Friday, when a reporter asked Graham about calling witnesses, he said that he couldn’t “answer the phone any more” without hearing a demand that he call Hunter Biden. He didn’t say how many of those calls came from the White House. Graham, though, seems aware that opening the door to witnesses will likely mean closing the door on whatever defenses Trump might have left. So, as much as Graham railed about Hunter, his message was that there would be a time to investigate the Bidens, and that he would help to do it—but not yet. “To my Republican friends,” he said, “you may be upset about what happened in the Ukraine with the Bidens, but this is not the venue to litigate it.” He repeatedly referred to Hunter Biden doing business in Ukraine while his father was dealing with Ukraine issues as “bad foreign policy,” presumably laying the groundwork for Senate hearings into the matter. But those would come after the impeachment trial is over. Then, Graham said, “I’m going to look at them. You gonna impeach me?"

There is, it should be said, plenty to regret in Hunter Biden’s business dealings, even though there is no evidence that he broke any laws—or that his father took any official action on his behalf. The U.S. officials who testified in the House impeachment hearings said that they didn’t believe that Joe Biden had acted in any corrupt way, though they acknowledged concerns about the appearance that Hunter Biden’s connection to Burisma, a Ukrainian company that is widely regarded as corrupt, presented. (Graham on those witnesses: “I bet you they haven’t spent five minutes looking at this, and, if they have, I want the report.”) He was paid a great deal of money by Burisma to hold a seat on its board. Nevertheless, the House impeachment managers, in their presentation, made the decision to argue that, as Representative Sylvia Garcia put it on Thursday, there is absolutely “no basis” for an investigation and that “even the Ukrainians believe that Biden’s son did nothing wrong.” Yet, by spending time on him, and presenting him as, essentially, blameless, the House managers may well have given weight to the argument that his testimony is relevant. Of course, the managers may be calculating that the case for calling Biden is also the case for calling witnesses in general—including Bolton—and that the more the Republicans talk about wanting anyone to testify, the better it is for the Democrats.

In any event, the President’s legal team hardly needs to be forced to talk about the Bidens. The trial memorandum they submitted is full of personal attacks on Hunter, noting, for example, that, “just two months before joining the board, he had been discharged from the Navy Reserve for testing positive for cocaine on a drug test” and arguing that “House Democrats’ accusations rest on the false and dangerous premise that Vice President Biden somehow immunized his conduct (and his son’s) from any scrutiny by declaring his run for the presidency.” The President’s lawyers left him more or less alone on Saturday morning, when they briefly introduced their case, but that won’t continue. Whether or not Biden is a witness, he’ll be a Republican target, and his father will be, too. Graham, again, had a note of caution for his side, dressed up as an attack on the Bidens. “I think they should tear apart the narrative presented by the House managers,” he said. But all the President’s lawyers had to do to fulfill that mandate was to raise suspicions, Graham said, “and urge us when this is over to look at it.”

By any measure, Graham’s demands for a Biden investigation, and those of the President’s legal team, are an enormous act of evasion. Graham spoke as though the real problem was a collective failure to hold Biden to account, which Trump had needed to correct. Graham told reporters on Friday that “nobody in your business has spent fifteen minutes telling us about what Hunter Biden did.” (He must have missed the in-depth piece that Adam Entous wrote for this magazine last year.) And his statement that the investigation he seeks should take place after the trial, “outside of politics,” is an extraordinary one, considering that Trump is being impeached for bringing his demands for an investigation way outside any setting where they should have been. Graham also said that the best person to look into the case might be “somebody like Mueller, that we could all trust.” Robert Mueller, of course, got almost no trust from the President’s side when he was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. But, however disingenuous Graham’s protestations are, his goal remained clear: no new witnesses. Not even Hunter Biden. It’s not worth the risk.