President Trump acknowledged today 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 Zelensky 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 Zelensky for an investigation.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Trump urged Zelensky 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 already publicly acknowledged pressing Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens, and Trump told reporters on 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 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 whistle-blower’s complaint that has generated intense interest on Capitol Hill.
The administration has refused to release the complaint to Congress.
Trump said today 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 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 Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “There is no privilege that covers corruption.”
Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said Congress had to take action.
“If we do have the evidence from this whistle-blower 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 as he called for release of the whistle-blower’s complaint.
Murphy, who recently visited Ukraine, said Zelensky 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 Kiev 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.