President Donald Trump indicated Friday that it would be “appropriate” for him to consult with U.S. Attorney General William Barr about opening an investigation into the former vice president and 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden.
“Certainly it would be an appropriate thing to speak to him about, but I have not done that as of yet,” Trump told Politico. “It could be a very big situation.”
Crime spree
The president was referring to allegations that Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who happened to be leading a corruption investigation of a natural gas company that employed his son Hunter Biden. During a Council on Foreign Relations event last year, Biden bragged about how he threatened to withdraw $1 billion in U.S. aid in 2016 unless Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko fired Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden said he told Poroshenko. “Well, son of a b****h, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
By “solid,” Biden ostensibly meant that he found a prosecutor who wouldn’t continue the corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, which employed Hunter Biden as a board member.
Barr might also look into concerns that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton campaign illegally reached out to Ukraine for help in exposing damaging information about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Last month, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked the president if Americans should be interested in Ukraine’s ongoing investigation into the Clinton team’s attempt to work with local officials to hurt the Trump campaign. “I think we do. It sounds like big stuff, very interesting with Ukraine,” Trump told Hannity.
