Fox News host Chris Wallace pressed Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short on why President Trump is interested in investigating debunked allegations that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
Wallace brought up the topic on Fox News Sunday, asking Short, “Does President Trump still believe that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election?”
“It doesn’t have to be an either/or. It can be both,” Short responded.
Again Wallace asked, “Does the president believe that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election?”
“He thinks that we should at least investigate it, Chris,” Short answered, later saying, “When Russia interfered in our election, Barack Obama was president and Joe Biden was vice president. And Joe Biden himself said he was in charge of Ukraine policy, and his son is getting between $50,000 and $80,000 a month to serve on a board where he has no experience whatsoever,” Short continued, referring to the 2020 Democratic presidential front-runner and his son, Hunter Biden.
“It seems like we could never get enough investigation of foreign interference in our election for three years, but as soon as the president asks for it, it’s like, ‘Hey, we must impeach him,’” he continued.
“Well, that’s not why it happened, as you know,” Wallace countered. “There was a phone call and the question of the conditionality of a White House visit and giving them military aid, and that it was on that basis [Trump] was asking for the investigation … So, why does the president think it’s still worth investigating whether Ukraine did something?”
Short said the White House is “not questioning Russia’s interference,” but that “doesn’t mean others didn’t as well.”
On FOX News Sunday, Chris asks Marc Short if the president believes Ukraine meddled in the U.S. election. Marc Short says “He [the President] thinks we should at least investigate it.” #FoxNews #FNS pic.twitter.com/lIbZ2zaaiz
— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) December 22, 2019
In Trump’s July 25 phone call with the president of Ukraine, which sparked his impeachment, he urged the foreign leader to look into allegations that Ukraine hacked the Democratic National Committee’s server during the 2016 presidential election.
During the House’s impeachment hearings, Trump’s former top Russia adviser on the National Security Council condemned the claims as Russian propaganda, calling them “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
