A senior adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister said the country is prepared to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter, but only if there is a formal request from President Trump.
“As soon as there is an official request,” Ukraine will look into the matter, but “currently there is no open investigation,” Anton Geraschenko told the Daily Beast.
Natural gas firm Burisma Holdings began employing Hunter Biden as a board member in 2014, when Joe Biden was vice president. The elder Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if Ukraine did not fire its top prosecutor, who had been accused of corruption and had been investigating the oligarch who owned the energy company, raising concerns about a possible conflict of interest.
“Clearly, Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison,” said Geraschenko, using the Russian term for blackmail.
“We do not investigate Biden in Ukraine, since we have not received a single official request to do so,” he said.
Geraschenko, whose boss would oversee any such investigation, made the comments before reports this week revealed a whistleblower in the intelligence community made a complaint about Trump’s communications with a foreign leader in which he made a “promise” of some sort. Few specifics about the complaint are known, but it reportedly involves Ukraine. Geraschenko reconfirmed his comments on Friday after the reports came out.
The whistleblower, who has not been identified publicly, submitted the complaint in August to the inspector general for Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Michael Atkinson, the inspector general, found the complaint to be of “urgent concern” and gave it to acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire.
[Related: ‘Another media disaster’: Trump slams press over whistleblower allegations]
Last Friday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff announced that Atkinson reached out to him after Maguire sat on the complaint. The California Democrat said Maguire, who is only a month into his role as acting spy chief, defied a statute requiring such a complaint and the inspector general’s analysis be delivered to the intelligence committees within seven days. Schiff also said he issued a subpoena for the complaint to be handed over by Tuesday.
But Maguire resisted the demand after consulting the Justice Department. His general counsel, Jason Klitenic, said the complaint “involves confidential and potentially privileged matters” and lies outside Maguire’s jurisdiction because it involved an individual outside the intelligence community.
Focus has now turned to a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Schiff said this week Maguire gave him a “strong implication” the whistleblower’s complaint was relevant to one of his committee’s investigations, and his team was already looking into the Trump-Zelensky call as part of a sweeping, multicommittee inquiry into Trump’s and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s role in “two politically-motivated investigations under the guise of anti-corruption activity.”
Three committees are examining whether Trump attempted to improperly pressure the Ukrainian government by withholding funds for its fight against Russian aggression unless they agree to assist the president’s reelection campaign by investigating Hunter Biden’s connections.
The panels are additionally looking into whether there was an effort to seek the “prosecution of Ukrainians who provided key evidence against Mr. Trump’s convicted campaign manager Paul Manafort,” who is in prison for illegal lobbying on behalf of Ukrainian interests and financial fraud.
Trump told reporters on Friday that his conversations with world leaders are “always appropriate.” He also said, “Someone ought to look into Joe Biden.”
Giuliani, during a wild interview Thursday evening on CNN, said he has “no idea” what Trump told Zelensky over the phone and asserted that he acted independently in pressing the Ukrainian government to investigate matters related to Biden and Manafort. “I did what I did on my own,” he said.
Critics see parallels to the 2016 election, in which Trump was alleged to have coordinated with Russia. “The president asked a foreign power to help him win an election. Again,” Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton said in a tweet Friday. Special counsel Robert Mueller was unable to establish any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Looking ahead to next week, Trump is scheduled to meet Zelensky at the United Nations General Assembly, and Maguire is expected to testify before the House and Senate intelligence panels. In suggesting Trump or top aides are stonewalling the intelligence community, Schiff threatened to take the matter to court. “We will look at whatever remedies we have,” Schiff told reporters on Thursday.
