Trump asked Ukraine president to look into Biden activities
WASHINGTON US President Donald Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a July telephone call to investigate whether former Vice President Joe Biden shut down an investigation into a company that employed his son, a summary of the call released by the Trump administration on Wednesday showed.
House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday announced that the Democraticled House was moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry and directed six committees to proceed with investigations of the president’s actions. Democrats have accused Trump, who is seeking reelection next year, of soliciting Ukraine’s help to smear Biden, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, before the 2020 election.
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great,” Trump said in the call, according to the summary prvided by the Justice Department. “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it . ... It sounds horrible to me,” Trump said, according to the memo. The call occurred after Trump had ordered the US government to freeze about $391 million in American aid to Ukraine.
The House
inquiry
could lead to articles of impeachment in the House that could trigger a trial in the Senate on whether to remove Trump from office. “The actions of the Trump presidency revealed a dishonorable fact of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” Pelosi said on Tuesday. Trump has withstood repeated scandals since taking office in 2017 and House Democrats had considered, but never moved ahead with, pursuing articles of impeachment over Trump’s actions relating to Russian interference in the 2016 US election aimed at boosting his candidacy.
(Reuters)