Trump admits he discussed Biden, son in Ukraine call
Dems seek probe into whether he tried to ‘bully’ foreign leader
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 with the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, on an investigation of Biden and his son.
Giuliani has 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.
Trump’s interest over the summer in a Ukrainian investigation into Biden, a Democratic front-runner to challenge him 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.
Trump 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.”
The revelations increased pressure on Democrats to impeach Trump after months of stutter-start investigation into other matters and after resistance by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pursue such an effort, with polls showing only limited public appetite for Congress removing the president from office.
“This would be, I think, the most profound violation of the presidential oath of office, certainly during this presidency, which says a lot,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “There is no privilege that covers corruption.”
Schiff, speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,”
said impeachment “may be the only remedy” if Trump did in fact withhold aid to Ukraine in the hopes that the country would pursue an investigation into the Biden family. “The president is pushing us down this road,” Schiff said. “We may very well have crossed the Rubicon here.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, DConn., said Congress had to take action. “If we do have the evidence from this whistleblower that the president indeed did try to bully a foreign power into affecting our elections, then we have to do something about it,” he said on “Meet the Press” on NBC as he called for release of the whistleblower’s complaint.
Murphy, who recently visited Ukraine, said Zelenskiy expressed consternation to him that the security aid was held up. The senator said administration officials gave him two explanations for holding up the money — that Trump was concerned about corruption in Ukraine and that he thought Europe should be the one to assist Ukraine rather than the United States.
But Murphy cast doubt on those explanations and said the situation was clearly suspicious. “Obviously, the timing of this looks really terrible,” he said.
Treasury Secretary Steven
Mnuchin on Sunday denied any link between the security aid and Trump’s interest in an investigation into his potential rival.
“Well, that I can tell you, that there was no connection,” Mnuchin said on the same show. “I have been involved with Secretary Pompeo and others on the national security team on the issue.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, appearing on several Sunday shows, did not answer in specifics when asked if there was a “quid pro quo” agreement between Trump and Ukrainian officials. He insisted more generally that any discussions of aid delivered to Ukraine were “100% appropriate” and “100% lawful.”
On the other hand, Pompeo did not hesitate to advance allegations that Biden should be investigated for wrongdoing.
“If there was election interference that took place by the vice president, I think the American people deserve to know,” he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. If “Vice President Biden behaved in a way that was inconsistent with the way leaders ought to operate, I think the American people deserve to know that.”
While vice president, Biden threatened in 2016 to withhold $1 billion in American loan guarantees if Ukraine’s leaders did not
dismiss the country’s top prosecutor, who was widely seen as failing to fight corruption. Ukraine’s Parliament complied, and the prosecutor was forced out.
That was the policy of the Obama administration at the time, a consensus policy to try to strengthen the rule of law in Ukraine as it fended off military intervention from Russia. But Biden’s son Hunter served on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had come under scrutiny by the fired prosecutor.
Joe Biden said Saturday that he had never spoken with his son about overseas work. On Sunday, Trump and Mnuchin accused him of lying or misstating that, without citing any evidence.
Trump spoke with Zelenskiy in July shortly after the Ukrainian was elected as a reformer and inaugurated in May. The White House readout of the call that day said only that Trump congratulated him on his election and that the two “discussed ways to strengthen the relationship between the United States and Ukraine, including energy and economic cooperation.”
The Ukrainian readout of the call at the time, however, hinted at other topics, saying Trump had expressed his faith in the new Ukrainian government to
“complete investigations into corruption cases that have hampered UkraineU.S. cooperation.”
In his comments to reporters Sunday, Trump said there was nothing wrong with the call. “The conversation, by the way, was absolutely perfect,” he said. “It was a beautiful, warm, nice conversation.”
Making an unscheduled appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Giuliani tried to focus attention on Biden’s actions rather than his own or Trump’s.
In an 11-minute, often rambling interview, Giuliani delivered accusation after accusation against Hunter Biden, painting the former vice president’s son as a grifter and career criminal. “And the kid, unfortunately, is a drug addict,” Giuliani said.
He called out Ukrainian officials and Democratic donor George Soros by name as being involved in a vast criminal conspiracy, connecting the dots on “Ukrainian collusion” that was aimed at influencing the 2016 presidential election.
“When the rest of this comes out,” Giuliani said, referring to additional allegations about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China, “this will be a lot bigger than Spiro Agnew.”
Trump, too, mentioned China and attacked Hunter Biden, saying he was unqualified to be making the money he did with his overseas ventures. “The son, he knew nothing, the son is a stiff, he knew nothing,” Trump said.
While Democrats spoke out, Republican lawmakers largely remained silent. “I can’t imagine why people have lost their minds so much over these, these daily reports of one thing or another,” Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, said when reporters encountered him in Houston while waiting for Trump to arrive. “They seem to consume everybody’s attention in the news coverage.”
Cornyn demurred when asked whether a president should pressure a foreign leader to investigate a political rival. “I’m not going to speculate,” he said. “I think the president ought to be able to talk to world leaders and have a conversation without necessarily being public because that you need to have those discussions.”
Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said more needed to be known to draw a conclusion. “Look, it is not appropriate for any candidate for federal office, certainly, including a sitting president, to ask for assistance from a foreign country. That’s not appropriate,” he said on NBC. “But I don’t know that that’s what happened here.”