Trump acknowledges bringing up Biden in call

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump acknowledged Sunday that he discussed former Vice President Joe Biden with Ukraine’s president as Democrats ramped up calls for an investigation into whether he improperly pressured a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent.

While Trump defended his July phone call with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine as perfectly appropriate, he confirmed that Biden came up during the discussion and that he accused the former vice president of corruption tied to his son Hunter’s business activities in that former Soviet republic.

“The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, with largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place and largely the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine,” Trump told reporters before leaving for a trip to Texas and Ohio.

Trump did not directly confirm news reports that he pressured Zelenskiy for an investigation. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Trump urged Zelenskiy about eight times during the July 25 phone call to work Trump Biden with the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, on an investigation of Biden and

his son.

Giuliani has already publicly acknowledged pressing Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens, and Trump told reporters Friday and again over the weekend that the former vice president should be investigated without saying whether it came up during the phone call.

The president’s interest over the summer in a Ukrainian investigation into Biden, a Democratic frontrunner to challenge Trump in next year’s election, coincided with his administration’s decision to hold up $250 million in security aid to Ukraine. But there have been no indications that Trump mentioned the money during the call. The president finally agreed to release the money this month after coming under bipartisan pressure from Congress.

Trump’s interactions with Ukraine are at least part of a whistleblower’s complaint that has generated intense interest on Capitol Hill. The administration has refused to release the whistleblower’s complaint to Congress. Trump said Sunday that he would “love” to release a transcript of the call “but you have to be a little bit shy about doing it.”