A livid Joe Biden lashed out at President Trump Saturday as accusations flew over a whistleblower’s report that Trump put pressure on the Ukraine to investigate the former veep’s son.
“This appears to be an overwhelming abuse of power,” Biden told reporters in Des Moines, Iowa.
“Trump’s doing this because he knows I’ll beat him like a drum and is using the abuse of power and every element of the presidency to try to do something to smear me,” he said.
The outburst came after Trump disputed media reports of the whistleblower’s story with a series of tweets that sought to turn the issue against his potential 2020 electoral foe.
“Nothing was said that was in any way wrong,” Trump tweeted of his July phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Instead, Trump wrote, the “real and only story” is a Biden scandal: “the Joe Biden demand that the Ukrainian Government fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son, or they won’t get a very large amount of U.S. money,” he tweeted.
The increasingly bloody Trump-Biden grudge match has its roots in allegations dating back to 2016 that the then-vice-president strong-armed the Ukrainian government into ousting its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating a natural gas firm that had put Biden’s son Hunter on its payroll.
Hunter Biden became a board member of Burisma Holdings in 2014, soon after President Barack Obama placed his father in charge of managing U.S. relations with Ukraine.
The younger Biden’s company, Rosemont Seneca Partners, was paid up to $166,000 a month, The Hill has reported — even though Hunter Biden had no experience in the fuel industry and no prior business dealings in the Ukraine.
“Not one single outlet has given any credibility to [Trump’s] assertion” that Biden intervened for his son’s benefit, he said Friday. “Not one single one.”
But in 2018, Biden himself talked about pushing the Ukraine to remove Shokin in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations — without disclosing his son’s ties to the Ukrainian company.
In March 2016, Biden recalled, he told Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that the US government would cancel $1 billion of loan guarantees unless Shokin, who was facing his own charges of corruption, was removed from office.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion,’” Biden said in the videotaped speech. “I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’”
“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired,” Biden concluded. Shokin was formally ousted from his post by the Ukrainian Parliament that same month.
Within weeks, the investigation into Burisma was dropped. Hunter Biden remained on its board until April 2019, severing his ties with the company days before Joe Biden announced his White House run.
Ukraine’s current top prosecutor said in May that he had seen no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden in their dealings with Burisma and with the Ukrainian government.
But ever since, Trump and his attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, have been publicly and privately pushing Zelensky’s government to reopen their case.
Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire refused on Thursday to give the House Intelligence Committee any details about a whistleblower complaint against Trump that was filed with Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson.
Democrats like Nancy Pelosi have denounced Trump’s “stonewalling” — and others, including presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, called it a potentially impeachable offense.
The whistleblower’s complaint centers on a July phone call in which Trump pressed Zelensky eight times to work with Giuliani on a new probe into the Bidens’ Ukraine dealings, according to multiple reports.
Trump did not threaten to withhold aid to Ukraine or offer any other quid-pro-quo in exchange, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
Meanwhile, State Department officials have put out an alternate timeline, saying that it was Ukrainian officials who launched the conversation about a potential investigation into the activities of Biden and other Obama Administration officials, The Hill reported.
Trump will meet with Zelensky in New York on Wednesday during the UN General Assembly, the White House said.