“There are a lot of questions about Hunter,” Fox News anchor Shannon Bream asked Dr. Jill Biden yesterday in Iowa. “How much of a discussion do you think is legitimate about his business dealings in Ukraine and China?”
“The bottom line is this isn’t about Hunter,” the former second lady said about her stepson. “It’s about Donald Trump, who asked a foreign government to come into our country and get involved in our elections.”
How sad to see the normally benign Dr. Biden lie on national TV about the basic facts underlying President Trump’s impeachment trial.
No, Trump did not ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to “come into our country and get involved in our elections.” This is a cartoon version of the Ukraine-o-rama controversy. In Dr. Biden’s mind, Trump tried to recruit secret henchmen from Kiev to fly into the United States to spy on her husband and, perhaps, other candidates — all to secure Trump a second term in the White House. Had Trump done this, his impeachment by the House would have been justified, and his removal from office would be a real possibility when the Senate votes tomorrow on Trump’s fate.
Fortunately for America, and unfortunately for the Bidens, Trump did no such thing. Thus, the Senate is expected to acquit the president on both articles of impeachment — as it should.
The overlooked-but-pivotal transcript of Trump and Zelensky’s phone call confirms that Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart:
“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…I guess you have one of your wealthy people…The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.”
Later in the conversation, after Zelensky speaks at length, Trump said: “The other thing. There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that [Joe] Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General [William Barr] would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it…It sounds horrible to me.”
(The ellipses above were in the transcript that President Trump declassified.)
To recap:
Trump asked Zelensky “to do us a favor” because “our country,” America, has endured Russiagate, “and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” So, “if you can look into” the Bidens’ actions and do “whatever you can” with Attorney General Barr, that “would be great.”
The Bidens’ likely misconduct included Joe’s quid pro quo: In March 2016, he blackmailed former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. The former vice president threatened to block a $1 billion U.S. government loan guarantee until Poroshenko fired Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was probing Burisma, the crooked Ukrainian natural-gas company that was paying Hunter between $50,000 and $83,333 per month to serve on its board of directors. Biden boasted on camera about extorting Petroshenko in a January 23, 2018 appearance before the Council of Foreign Relations, of which I am a member.
Whether or not one agrees with Trump that this call was “perfect,” it surely included absolutely nothing about getting Ukraine to “come into our country and get involved in our elections.”
Dr. Biden should retract her utterly false and reckless comments, apologize to President Trump for concocting charges against him, and beg America’s voters to forgive her for this grotesque act of political malpractice.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.
