US President Donald Trump has defended his demand from Ukraine’s president to investigate Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden over influence-peddling allegations linked to his son, Hunter.
In a pair of tweets on Saturday, Trump reiterated that Biden’s links with Ukraine needed to be investigated, emphasizing that the former vice president had persuaded the country to fire a top prosecutor in 2016.
Trump complained that media corporations were avoiding coverage of the Biden’s Ukraine scandal.
“The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, want to stay as far away as possible from 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 US money, so they fabricate a story about me and a perfectly fine and routine conversation I had with the new President of the Ukraine,” Trump tweeted.
Trump said his request from the Ukraine president to investigate Biden and his son was legitimate, while Biden’s request to fire a judge was a “disaster”.
“Nothing was said that was in any way wrong, but Biden’s demand, on the other hand, was a complete and total disaster. The Fake News knows this but doesn’t want to report!” he added.
Biden, on Friday, dismissed the allegations raised against him by Trump for lacking credibility.
“Not one single, credible outlet has given any credibility to his assertion. Not one single one,” Biden said of Trump’s allegation against him. “So I have no comment except the president should start to be president.”
Meanwhile, calls for Trump’s impeachment grew louder on Friday as new details emerged about Trump’s controversial telephone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
According to multiple news reports, during the phone conversation with Zelensky in July, Trump tried to persuade the president of Ukraine into working with his personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, to investigate Biden and his son.
Trump reportedly pressed the Ukrainian president eight times, urging him repeatedly to launch an investigation against Biden’s son.
He also withheld military aid until earlier this month to increase pressure on the Ukrainian president.
The full details of the allegations, which are outlined in a whistleblower report currently withheld from Congress by the Trump administration, are still unclear.
The emerging consensus is that, if true, the reported abuses surpass even those outlined in the Mueller Report on Russian interference in 2016.
“This is impeachable now,” congressional expert and historian Norm Ornstein tweeted on Friday evening.
