For the second night in a row, Joe Biden sidestepped the prospect of President Trump’s impeachment before high-dollar donors.
Biden, speaking at a fundraiser in Manhattan Beach, California, regurgitated much of his stump speech while addressing the crowd of 150 supporters but skirted around House Speaker Nancy Pelosi backing a formal impeachment inquiry and the White House’s release of a transcript between Trump and the Ukrainian president.
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“The transcripts are very revealing,” the former vice president told reporters when pressed as he left the event.
The brevity of Biden’s remarks clash with a lengthy statement his campaign issued after the White House made public a transcript of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s new leader. During the conversation, Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate a matter related to Biden, Biden’s lobbyist son Hunter Biden, and a Ukrainian oligarch-owned energy company, of which the younger Biden served on the board of directors between 2014 and April 2019. The matter was connected to Joe Biden’s boast in 2018 that, as vice president, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if Ukraine did not fire top prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Shokin had been probing the natural gas firm, but it was “dormant” at the time of Biden’s threat.
It is the second fundraiser in as many days where Biden has avoided talking about Democratic-led efforts on Capitol Hill to impeach Trump. Delaware’s longtime senator skipped over the impeachment subject in Baltimore on Tuesday night despite holding a press conference that afternoon touting his support for Trump’s ouster.
Trying to woo the mostly Indian American audience on Wednesday, Biden also recalled a trip to Mumbai and acknowledged how many in attendance were immigrants who became naturalized citizens.
“We’ve been able to take the best of every country in the world, from every continent,” he said. “You all decided to come. You weren’t sure what was going to happen either. The people who came had resilience. They had hope. They had optimism. They were determined. They were in fact ready to be inclusive. You represent why we’re the nation we are.”
