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Joe Biden Blasts Trump Over Reported Effort to Get Ukraine President to Investigate His Son

Joe Biden is furious over reports of alleged efforts from Trump to have Hunter Biden’s business dealings investigated.

Biden called Trump’s behavior “abhorrent.”

USA Today reports former Vice President Joe Biden on Friday accused President Trump of  “abhorrent” behavior amid news reports that the president pressured Ukraine’s president to launch an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings in the country.

Biden’s comments come in the wake of multiple news reports that a whistleblower from the intelligence community filed a complaint with the inspector general overseeing the community concerning a phone call Trump made with a foreign leader.

Lawmakers are separately investigating whether Trump pushed for Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to probe Biden’s family’s dealings in his country.

“If these reports are true, then there is truly no bottom to President Trump’s willingness to abuse his power and abase our country,” Biden said in a statement Friday evening. “This behavior is particularly abhorrent because it exploits the foreign policy of our country and undermines our national security for political purposes. It means that he used the power and resources of the United States to pressure a sovereign nation — a partner that is still under direct assault from Russia — pushing Ukraine to subvert the rule of law in the express hope of extracting a political favor.”

Asked by reporters after a campaign event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, about reports that Trump wanted Biden’s son Hunter to be investigated by the Ukrainian government, Biden offered only a brief comment defending his son.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa … wait a second. Not one single credible outlet has given credibility to these assertions. Not one single one,” Biden said as he left a nature center where he had spoken at a town hall on climate issues. “So I have no comment other than the president should start to be president.”

Biden added in an interview with the political blog Iowa Starting Line that he found it “concerning to me that a president would do something like that.”

“It’s totally inappropriate for a president to try to get a foreign leader to say something that is untrue about any political opponent,” Biden said in the interview. “I’ve never heard of it before. I’ve never heard of it before. But I think that Congress is looking into it, and I think they should.”

The president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has previously raised questions that Biden, as vice president, had pushed for the ouster of former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, who had investigated a private Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Group. Hunter Biden was a board member of Burisma.

But Ukraine’s current prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, told Bloomberg News Service in May that he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden or his son.

“Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws — at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing,” Lutsenko told Bloomberg. “A company can pay however much it wants to its board.”

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden and work with his personal attorney, Giuliani, on the matter.

“At minimum, Donald Trump should immediately release the transcript of the call in question, so that the American people can judge for themselves, and direct the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to stop stonewalling and release the whistleblower notification to the Congress,” Biden said.

This article was written by the staff of TheConservativeOpinion.com 

By  Jon Heltzel

Source: theconservativeopinion

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