President Donald Trump pressured Attorney General William Barr to investigate the son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, saying the information should be released before Nov. 3.
“We have got to get the attorney general to act. He’s got to act and he’s got to act fast,” Trump told Fox News on Tuesday morning, referring to a New York Post report about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China. Later, he said Barr should handle the matter.
“He’s gotta appoint somebody,“ the president said. ”This is major corruption and this has to be known about before the election.”
The Biden Campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Emails that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden, sourced from a laptop that was purportedly left at a repair shop in Delaware, revealed that he may have arranged a meeting between his father, who was the vice-president at the time, and a Ukrainian gas executive. Hunter Biden was sitting on the board of the same energy firm, Burisma Holdings. The Biden campaign and Hunter Biden’s lawyer have both denied the claims that the elder Biden met with the executive.
The email correspondence showed one of those executives, Vadym Pozharskyi, thanking the younger Biden for “inviting me to D.C. and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together [sic].” The NY Post reported that it showed the Biden family may have been operating an influence-peddling scheme.
President Trump and his GOP allies in Congress have seized on the NY Post’s reports, accusing the Bidens of being corrupt and the former vice president of being unfit to serve in the White House.
“The vice president got a kickback and everybody knows it and they’ve known it for a long time,” Trump said on Tuesday.
Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told media outlets last week: “Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump Administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.”
Hunter Biden’s lawyer also said former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is currently one of Trump’s lawyers, of trying to peddle disinformation. Giuliani said he provided the alleged Hunter Biden laptop hard drive to the NY Post. The shop owner handed the laptop and an external hard drive to the FBI in December 2019.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told CNN over the weekend that the new Biden revelations smacked of a Russian disinformation campaign that came “from the Kremlin.”
Schiff’s claims were disputed by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who on Monday, said that “Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.” He asserted that Schiff “wants anything against his preferred political candidate” Biden considered “not real.”
