‘ Biden must give up records’
US president calls for rival to release information about ‘ secret’ family business deals
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump yesterday stressed his Democratic rival in the coming election, Joe Biden, should release all of the information related to his involvement in family business dealings in light of recently published letters pointing to his possible links to Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
“Joe Biden must immediately release all emails, meetings, phone calls, transcripts and records related to his involvement in his family’s business dealings and influence peddling around the world – including in China,” Trump wrote on Twitter, before the candidates’ virtual addresses last night – Trump in Miami and Biden in Philadelphia, instead of a face- toface debate which was cancelled after Trump’s Covid- 19 diagnosis.
Yesterday, the US president gave a shout- out to the New York Post for having exposed what he described as “the massive corruption surrounding Sleepy Joe”.
The New York Post had published two e- mails that Vadym Pozharskyi, a top official at Burisma, allegedly sent to Biden’s son, Hunter, who used to work for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma as well.
In one of the purported letters, Pozharskyi thanks Hunter for organising a meeting with his father, while in the second letter he asks Hunter how he could use his “influence” to support the Ukrainian company.
In the emails, which are said to have been found on a laptop abandoned at a Delaware computer shop, Hunter seems to leverage the fact that his father was the US vice president and would be visiting Kiev soon. Biden’s campaign claimed that the NY Post never asked about the story’s central elements and that the meeting did not happen.
The alleged e- mails run counter to the Democratic candidate’s claims that he has nothing to do with his younger son’s work for Burisma.
Last year, attempts by Trump to get Kiev to reopen a 2015 probe into Hunter’s business dealings led to Trump’s impeachment for abuse of power, and his efforts were decried by critics as an attempt to influence the 2020 presidential race.
After the New York Post dropped the bombshell story, “Hunter Biden emails show leveraging connections with his father to boost Burisma pay”, and it started going viral, Facebook and Twitter took measures to limit its spread.
Meanwhile, Trump has been trying to shore up support from constituencies that not so long ago he thought he had in the bag – big business and voters in the red state of Iowa.
In an address to business leaders this week, he expressed puzzlement that they would even consider supporting Biden, arguing that his own leadership was a better bet for a strong economy. Trump has played up his administration’s commitment to lowering taxes and deregulation of industry. Trump claimed to be leading in the most recent Iowa poll he saw. “For me to only be up six, I’m a little bit concerned,” he asserted. Multiple polls have shown a much closer race.
At a virtual fundraiser from Wilmington, Delaware, Biden said that Trump was trying to rush through Judge Amy Coney Barrett, his nominee for the Supreme Court, to help his efforts to repeal the Obama healthcare law, calling that “an abuse of power”.
The former vice president has collected more than $ 50 million in campaign contributions from donors in the securities and investment sectors.
During his decades in the senate representing Delaware, a centre for the credit card and banking industries, Biden built relationships in the business sector that have raised suspicion on the Left but provides Wall Street with a measure of ease.
In Iowa, Trump made a direct appeal to the state’s farmers, saying he was responsible for $ 28 billion in aid designed to help offset damage stemming from his trade war with China. But some Republicans say Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency granted dozens of waivers to petroleum companies seeking to bypass congressional rules requiring the level of the corn- based fuel additive, ethanol, that gasoline must contain, resulting in the closure of more than a dozen ethanol plants in Iowa.