"In early 2014, as others on Mr. Obama’s team raced to finish big-splash deals with Cuba and Iran, Mr. Biden told the president he wanted to take on three of the most unappetizing foreign-policy tasks left undone: containing the Islamic State, curbing immigration from Central America and keeping Russia from devouring Ukraine.... Mr. Biden applied his Amtrak charm to local players like Ukraine’s embattled president, Viktor Yanukovych, with limited effect. Former White House aides recall watching an agitated Mr. Biden ducking in and out of a secure phone booth outside the situation room in early 2014, trying to reach Mr. Yanukovych on his cellphone. 'Where the hell is this guy?' he kept asking, before learning that Mr. Yanukovych had fled Kiev, ultimately for Russia, as huge street protests erupted against his regime’s corruption and his pivot away from Europe and toward Moscow. Mr. Putin then rushed in, annexing Crimea and backing paramilitaries who invaded the country’s east.... Things seemed to be looking up in May 2014 with the election of Mr. Poroshenko, an oligarch who billed himself as a reformer. At first, the vice president’s hard-edged messages to him on corruption were coated with kibbitz — demands accompanied by Bidenesque inquiries like whether the puffy-eyed president was getting enough sleep, aides recalled. Within months, though, the State Department began suspecting that the office of Mr. Poroshenko’s first prosecutor general was accepting bribes to protect Mykola Zlochevsky, the oligarch owner of Burisma Holdings, the gas company where Hunter Biden was a board member.... The prosecutor general was fired soon after. But it wasn’t long before the new prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was drawing allegations of corruption, including from State Department officials who suspected he was shaking down targets and intentionally slow-walking investigations to protect allies. Mr. Giuliani has claimed, without evidence, that Mr. Biden’s push to oust Mr. Shokin was an attempt to block scrutiny of his son’s actions...."
From
"What Joe Biden Actually Did in Ukraine" by Glenn Thrush and Kenneth P. Vogel (at MSN.com and originally in the NYT).
That "without evidence" — in "Mr. Giuliani has claimed, without evidence..." — would make more sense to me if the same words were used when people are imagining Trump's intentions based on something that we know he did.
We know what Trump said in his Ukraine phone call, but we continually hear that's strong evidence that he was using U.S. monetary aid to bribe Ukraine into manufacturing dirt on his political opponent to serve his personal interests.
Why don't they say people only
claim that
without evidence? We have evidence of Biden's statements and activities, but we don't know what was in his head, but he could have been motivated by a desire to cover for his son. That's an inference you could make from the evidence, and it's always hard to prove what's inside somebody's head.
I'd just like to see a consistent approach to talking about other people's thoughts. You could say "without evidence" whenever you're making an inference about thought from the evidence that we do have. Or you could make inferences from the evidence and just speak about them as if the inferences
are evidence.
Both of those approaches are bad, and I know damned well that nobody understanding the choice and wanting to be consistent and neutral would pick either option. What I want is clear speech about what evidence there is, the need to make inferences from the evidence, which inferences are stronger, and what we should do when there are different possible inferences.
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