Joe Biden ripped Rudy Giuliani for his role in trying to dig up political dirt on him and his son’s dealings in Ukraine while defending Hunter Biden from House Republican calls for him to testify before Congress as part of President Trump’s impeachment proceeding.
“There’s not been a scintilla of evidence pointing out anything wrong. But there are people around him, like that chump Rudy Giuliani and the thugs that he has working with him,” the former vice president said on Monday in Iowa of his family’s conduct.
Joe Biden dismissed the suggestion the younger Biden, a 49-year-old lobbyist who earned $50,000 a month from a Ukrainian oligarch-linked energy company while his father spearheaded the Obama administration’s foreign policy in the region, should appear on Capitol Hill before impeachment investigators.
“There is zero rationale for that to happen,” Biden said during a town hall televised on CNN. “This is all a diversion. This is classic Trump, classic Trump. Focus on the problem. We have a president who is one of the most corrupt people to serve in that office.”
The television event coincides with the impeachment proceeding’s first public hearings, scheduled to start on Wednesday. Investigators are looking into whether Trump improperly leveraged U.S. military aid with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to pressure him to examine the Bidens.
Giuliani pushed for a Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens since at least May, centering on Hunter Biden’s position on the board of Burisma Holdings, the natural gas company. The former New York mayor-turned-Trump’s personal lawyer also wanted an investigation into the elder Biden’s threat to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loans from Ukraine while urging then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire the country’s top prosecutor Viktor Shokin.
An associate of Giuliani told his lawyer he warned a representative of Zelensky’s government that the Trump administration would stop the flow of security assistance and Vice President Mike Pence would not attend Zelensky’s inauguration if the country did not publicly announce an investigation into the Bidens, according to the New York Times this week. Giuliani has denied the allegations. “Categorically, I did not tell him to say that,” he told the news outlet.
