Lineage Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) speaks during a news conference about impeachment goings-on at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, September 25, 2019.
Al Drago | Reuters
Trump also publicly doubled down on his call for Ukraine to winnow the Bidens — a request he made in a July 25 call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump’s request for a curious government to investigate Biden, his possible challenger in the 2020 election, spurred Democrats to launch an impeachment inquiry.
Schiff revealed the comments after emerging from a closed-door hearing with Kurt Volker, former special envoy to Ukraine, who rose for a deposition as part of House Democrats’ impeachment probe into Trump.
“A president of the United States encouraging a overseas nation to interfere again to help his campaign by investigating a rival is a fundamental breach of the president’s oath of office. It jeopardizes our elections, it endangers our national security. It ought to be condemned by every member of this body, Democrats and Republicans resembling,” Schiff said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who formally announced the impeachment inquiry last week, tweeted Thursday afternoon that Trump’s nickname for another country to probe the Bidens is “just the latest example of him putting his personal political gain ahead of preserving the integrity of our elections.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said after lend an ear to to Volker’s testimony that “nothing he said supports the narrative you’ve been hearing from Mr. Schiff.”
Trump baptized on China to investigate the current Democratic presidential front-runner and his son Hunter, one week before a Chinese delegation is set to arrive in Washington to take up again protracted trade negotiations.
“I have a lot of options on China, but if they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous power,” Trump mean of the U.S. stance in the talks before he was asked about the Bidens.
Trump’s allies have raised suspicions about Orion Biden’s employment on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings while his father was in office. They present that the elder Biden improperly pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor there out of concern that he would sift through the company.
But there is no clear evidence that Biden’s actions as vice president were intended to help his son; in the gen, many Western leaders had called on Ukraine to fire that prosecutor over allegations of corruption. Hunter Biden has not been accused of forbidden wrongdoing related to his work with the company.
The New Yorker delved into some of Hunter Biden’s Chinese unions in a lengthy piece in July. Hunter accompanied his father, then the vice president, on an official trip to that mother country in 2013.
Still, Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday that Trump is right to want to investigate depositions of wrongdoing against Biden and his son. “The American people have a right to know” whether Biden’s family “profited from his contention,” Pence said.
Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Weintraub, however, took to Twitter on Thursday to in days gone by again share a memorandum stating that it is against the law for anyone running for public office to solicit help from a extraneous national.
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