President Trump said on Sunday that he discussed former Vice President Joe Biden during a July phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.
Democrats are ramping up calls for an investigation into Trump’s conversation with the leader, during which he reportedly urged Zelensky to work with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to probe Biden’s son Hunter’s ties to an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.
“We had a great conversation,” Trump told reporters on Sunday as he departed the White House for Texas and Ohio. “The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption — all of the corruption taking place, was largely the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.”
Their phone call is also reportedly the subject of an intelligence community whistleblower complaint. The whistleblower, however, did not have “direct knowledge” of the conversation. So far, the acting director of national intelligence has refused to hand over the details of the complaint to Congress and is expected to testify before House and Senate intelligence panels this week.
Trump previously branded concerns about the call as the “Ukrainian Witch Hunt.” Later on Sunday, he denied pressuring Zelensky in a series of tweets.
..Breaking News: The Ukrainian Government just said they weren’t pressured at all during the “nice” call. Sleepy Joe Biden, on the other hand, forced a tough prosecutor out from investigating his son’s company by threat of not giving big dollars to Ukraine. That’s the real story!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2019
While Biden was still vice president, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if Ukraine did not fire its top prosecutor, who had been investigating the oligarch who owned the energy company of which his son was a board member. The 2020 Democratic front-runner has also denied any wrongdoing on his part and called for both an investigation into Trump’s call, as well as for the transcript to be released.
