WaPo | “I
am disappointed, and quite frankly I’m angered, by the fact — he knows
me, he knows my son. He knows there’s nothing to this,” Biden said.
“Trump is now essentially holding power over him that even the
Ukrainians wouldn’t yield to. The Ukrainians would not yield to, quote,
‘investigate Biden’ — there’s nothing to investigate about Biden or his
son.”
A Graham spokesman declined to comment and said the senator was unavailable.
Trump’s
personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has been at the center of
the House impeachment inquiry, claimed that Biden’s comment was a
“threat” against Graham.
“This is getting to be more and more like my old mafia cases,” Giuliani wrote on Twitter, alluding to his time as a federal prosecutor. “They sure do sound like crooks.”
Graham, in a letter sent Thursday
to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, asked for information related to
calls between Biden, when he was vice president, and then-President
Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, as well as documents that referred to an
investigation of Burisma.
In the Obama years, Biden played an integral role
in pushing Poroshenko to crack down on corruption in Ukraine,
pressuring him to fire a prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was widely seen
as corrupt and not doing enough to undertake crucial investigations.
The
efforts to oust Shokin were mounted in coordination with U.S. allies,
and several Republican senators were on board at the time. Now, however,
some Republicans are asserting that Biden was attempting to get rid of
Shokin to protect his son, an assertion contradicted by the
circumstances at the time.
Still,
Biden’s aides at the time expressed concern about Hunter’s position on
the board of Burisma, worried that it could create the perception of a
conflict of interest. Biden took no action to discourage his son from
remaining on the board.
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