President Donald Trump continuously asked the Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelensky to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son “about eight times during” one phone call in July.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump urged Zelensky to work with Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, on an investigation.
Trump defended his July call with Zelensky as “totally appropriate” but declined to say what the conversation was about.
“It doesn’t matter what I discussed,” he said.
Giuliani admitted during an interview for CNN that he had asked the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden.
“So you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden?” asked CNN’s Chris Cuomo.
“Of course I did,” said Giuliani.
The startling admission comes days after an “urgent” whistleblower complaint alleging Trump had a conversation with a Ukrainian leader and made an “alarming” promise, was blocked from being disclosed to congress.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) wrote in a tweet “If the President, in his official capacity, asked a foreign government to dig up dirt on a political opponent, Congress cannot let that stand. Our silence could doom the republic.”
He added in a second tweet that the revelation that this would be the second presidential election to have allegations of international interference.
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-California) called Trump’s phone call an impeachable offense.
“I’m sick of the parsing, dithering & political overcalculating,” Huffman tweeted.
In a tweet, giuliani defended the possibility of Trump asking Zelensky to investigate Biden.
“A President telling a Pres-elect of a well known corrupt country he better investigate corruption that affects US is doing his job,” Giuliani wrote.
