President Trump’s campaign moved swiftly to capitalize on a New York Post story suggesting then-Vice President Joe Biden met with a Ukrainian energy executive at the behest of his son, Hunter Biden.
The Trump campaign produced a television advertisement Wednesday titled “Hunter” that claims Joe Biden lied when he said in interviews with reporters that he and Hunter Biden never discussed his son’s business dealings. For more than a year, Trump and his allies have tried to undercut the Biden campaign with allegations of corruption on the part of the Democratic nominee, particularly related to the time Hunter Biden spent as a well-paid board member of the Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma.
The spot opens with a clip of Hunter Biden from an ABC News interview last year in which he says: “I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.”
From there, the ad’s voiceover declares: “Like your investment firm striking a billion-dollar deal with a Chinese-owned bank 10 days after you and Joe visit — and collecting over $80,000 a month from a Ukrainian energy company after your father was named point man on Ukraine.”
The Trump campaign, which has been short on resources and outgunned on the television airwaves by the Biden campaign, did not detail how much money it was investing in the ad or in which media markets it would play. The Biden campaign, meanwhile, said the reporting in the New York Post story is untrue.
