Joe Biden leveraged a report that President Trump urged Ukraine’s president this summer to investigate the former vice president’s lobbyist son, Hunter, into an end-of-quarter fundraising drive.
“You may have seen in the news that Donald Trump asked a foreign leader 8 times to investigate me and my family. Enough,” Biden texted supporters Saturday evening. “He’s using every element of the presidency to try to smear me. We need to set the record straight, but that will be expensive. Can you stand with me and chip in to my campaign?”
In that July conversation, reportedly the subject of an intelligence community whistleblower complaint, Trump is said to have implored Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to look into Hunter Biden’s ties with an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.
In 2014, while Joe Biden was vice president, Hunter Biden served on the board of natural gas firm Burisma Holdings. The elder Biden, during a trip to Kiev around that time, threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if Ukraine did not fire its top prosecutor, who had been accused of corruption and had been investigating the oligarch who owned the company.
The move raised concerns about a possible conflict of interest. Hunter Biden resigned from the $50,000-a-month post prior to his father launching his third bid for the White House this year.
Biden, the front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, has called for the release of a transcript of the discussion, supporting a House Democrat-led inquiry into the matter.
“Depending on what the House finds, he could be impeached, but I’m not making that judgment now,” he told reporters in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday. “He abuses power everywhere he can, and if he sees any threat to staying in power, he’ll do whatever he has to do — but this crosses the line.”
Trump also deflected criticism of his conduct on Saturday, defending himself in a string of tweets.
“The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, want to stay as far away as possible from the Joe Biden demand that the Ukrainian Government fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son, or they won’t get a very large amount of U.S. money, so they fabricate a story about me and a perfectly fine and routine conversation I had with the new President of the Ukraine,” the president wrote.
He continued, “Nothing was said that was in any way wrong, but Biden’s demand, on the other hand, was a complete and total disaster. The Fake News knows this but doesn’t want to report!”
