Trump asked Ukraine’s leader for Biden investigation

While seeking inquiry into political rival, president blocked military aid for the country fighting Russia-backed separatists

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump pressed the Ukrainian president in a July call to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, according to a person familiar with the conversation, an apparently blatant mixture of foreign policy with his 2020 reelection campaign.

Trump also repeatedly told President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine to talk with his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who had been urging the government in Kyiv for months to investigate Biden and his family, according to two other people briefed on the call.

Trump’s request for an investigation of the family of Biden, a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, is part of the secret whistleblower complaint that is said to be about Trump and at least in part about his dealings with Ukraine, according to two people familiar with the complaint.

The president has made no secret that he wanted Ukraine to investigate whether there was any improper overlap between Biden’s own diplomatic efforts there and his son’s role with a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch. “Someone ought to look into Joe Biden,” he told reporters Friday in response to a question about whether he brought up Biden during his call with Zelenskiy.

The new revelations gave added urgency to critical questions about Trump’s dealings with the Ukrainian government. At the same time that the president sought an investigation into a potential political rival, the Trump administration for weeks froze military aid for Ukraine, which is battling Russian-controlled separatists in the country’s east.

The United States suspended the assistance to Ukraine in early July, according to a former American official. Trump did not discuss the aid in the July 25 call with Zelenskiy, whose government did not learn of the suspension until August, according to people familiar with the call. The Wall Street Journal first reported details of it.

For Democrats who want to examine the whistleblower complaint — itself the subject of an internal administration dispute over whether to hand it over to Congress, as is generally required by law — the key question is whether Trump was demanding a quid pro quo, explicitly or implicitly. Democratic House committee chairmen are already investigating whether he misappropriated the American foreign policy apparatus for personal political advantage and have requested the transcript of his call with Zelenskiy from the State Department and the White House.

The burgeoning controversy had echoes of the dominant scandal of the first years of Trump’s administration: whether his campaign sought help from Russia to benefit him in 2016. Ultimately, the special counsel found that although “insufficient evidence” existed to determine that Trump or his advisers engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians, his campaign welcomed Moscow’s election sabotage and expected to benefit from it.

Any attempt by Trump to ask a foreign power to “dig up dirt” on a political rival while withholding aid is corrupt, said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, one of the panels that is examining Trump’s Ukraine dealings.

“No explicit quid pro quo is necessary to betray your country,” tweeted Schiff, who has also pushed for the whistleblower complaint to be given to Congress.

Trump opened a direct counterattack on Friday on the whistleblower, whose identity is unknown, as are many details about the complaint. The president dismissed the allegations and labeled the whistleblower, without evidence, a political partisan.

“It’s a ridiculous story. It’s a partisan whistleblower,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, though he also acknowledged he did not know the person’s identity. “They shouldn’t even have information.”

Trump and Giuliani have pressed for an investigation of the Bidens for weeks, after reports this year in the New York Times and elsewhere examined whether a Ukrainian oil company that had faced corruption investigations had sought to buy influence in Washington by hiring Biden’s younger son, Hunter Biden, who had a lobbying business in Ukraine while his father was vice president.

Congress has still not seen the whistleblower’s allegation. Although the inspector general for the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, has sought to provide it, the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, has blocked him in a dispute over legal requirements.

Maguire and his general counsel decided against providing the complaint to Congress after consulting with Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, according to a person familiar with the move.

Mounting evidence that the White House was involved in the effort to withhold the complaint from lawmakers has stirred anger on Capitol Hill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused Maguire of violating the law.