Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned against foreign election interference in the wake of reports that an abandoned laptop contains evidence of Hunter Biden monetizing his family ties during Joe Biden’s vice presidency.
“My mission as the Secretary of State is to do everything I can to make sure that countries aren’t propagating information in a way here,” Pompeo told Florida-based radio host Bud Hedinger. “That foreign element, that international component of this, is what the State Department is deeply focused on.”
Pompeo, who is under public pressure from President Trump to release emails pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as the secretary of state, trod lightly around the latest development in the controversy that gave rise to the impeachment fight before emerging again in the home stretch of the presidential campaign. In a series of radio interviews Thursday, he paired that hint about the risk of foreign interference with a general call for transparency from candidates.
“I have the hope and the expectation, as every American citizen ought to, that anybody who puts themselves forward for public office ought to respond to accusations in a way that the American people can come to fully evaluate what’s real and what’s not real,” Pompeo told Hedinger.
The allegations center on whether Joe Biden abused his power as vice president when he urged Ukrainian leaders to fire a disreputable prosecutor-general — a decision that Rudy Giuliani has portrayed as corrupt on the grounds that the official was in the midst of an investigation into a Ukrainian energy company that had hired Hunter Biden. U.S. officials testified during the impeachment investigation that they requested Joe Biden’s assistance in ousting the corrupt prosecutor-general, but one senior diplomat also revealed that he had flagged the younger Biden’s job was “very awkward” for American officials working in Ukraine.
“I raised my concern that Hunter Biden’s status as a board member could create the perception of a conflict of interest,” State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent testified. “Let me be clear; however, I did not witness any effort by any U.S. official to shield Burisma from scrutiny. In fact, I and other U.S. officials consistently advocated reinstituting a scuttled investigation of Zlochevsky, Burisma’s founder, as well as holding the corrupt prosecutors who closed the case to account.”
Yet documents that a Delaware computer store owner says were procured from a laptop left at his shop suggest that company officials appealed to Hunter Biden for help and with regards to a possible meeting with the then-vice president.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together,” one email attributed to Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi said.
Joe Biden’s team denied that he met with Pozharskyi and highlighted Giuliani’s ties to agents of Russian intelligence.
“Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said after the New York Post published the allegations on Wednesday. “They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani — whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported — claimed to have such materials.”
Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin put a spotlight on Giuliani’s search for evidence implicating Joe Biden in corruption charges last month when they denounced a Ukrainian lawmaker as “an active Russian agent” seeking to interfere in the 2020 elections. That lawmaker has released recordings sought by Giuliani, whom he met in December 2019, in which Joe Biden urges then-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor-general.
Trump has rebuked Pompeo publicly in recent days over the lack of new releases of emails stemming from Clinton’s tenure at Foggy Bottom. Pompeo, who responded initially by suggesting that additional Clinton documents would be revealed “before the election,” avoided touting that timeline on Thursday.
“We’re continuing to work to identify whether there are any more that are potentially available,” he said. “And to the extent that there are, we will process them and get them to the right place. Transparency is always a good thing.”
The new Hunter Biden report created an uproar on social media on Wednesday, as Twitter interfered with the distribution of the story, and Facebook throttled access to the report, citing the need to “reduce the spread of misinformation.” Pompeo refused to comment when asked in a different interview if the latest report “is part of a disinformation campaign from Russia,” but condemned the tech companies for blocking the story.
“So I don’t want to comment on this. This is really not a State Department function. It’s a U.S. domestic set of issues here,” he told Indianapolis talk show host Tony Katz. “But I will say this: There is a real challenge with some of America’s biggest technology firms banning, suspending accounts in a way that is inconsistent, that is viewpoint driven, that is ideologically driven. That’s simply unacceptable.”
