New texts pile pressure on Trump
US officials pressured their Ukrainian counterparts to launch investigations that could benefit President Donald Trump’s personal political agenda in exchange for a meeting between the two countries’ leaders, a cache of diplomatic texts released late on Thursday showed.
The exchanges were released by Democrats in the House of Representatives as part of an impeachment investigation to determine whether Trump pressed for Ukraine to probe former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, in connection with Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
Biden is a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. His son was on the board of Burisma for a number of years.
Kurt Volker, who resigned a week ago as Trump’s special representative to Ukraine, provided the messages to members of the House and staff of the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Oversight committees in a closed-door meeting earlier on Thursday.
Democrats are focusing on a July 25 telephone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in which the Republican president urges Zelenskiy to investigate Burisma and the Bidens.
In the hours before that call, Volker told one adviser to the Ukrainian president that a meeting between the countries’ two leaders was tied to Kiev’s agreement to investigate the 2016 US election, according to the committees.
Later messages between the aide, Andriy Yermak, and Volker showed dueling efforts to lock in a date for a Trump-Zelenskiy meeting and to issue a statement from Kiev announcing a “reboot” of relations along with the probes into Burisma and the 2016 election.
The cache also included messages from Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who played a major part in the administration’s dealings with Kiev.
In a signal of how Kiev will handle investigations being watched in Washington, Ukrainian prosecutors said they would review 15 old probes related to Burisma’s founder but added that they were unaware of any evidence of wrongdoing by Biden’s son.
Separately, the White House plans to argue that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, must have the full House vote to formally approve an impeachment inquiry, a source familiar with the effort said.
Without a vote, White House lawyers believe Trump, who has called the impeachment probe a “hoax,” can ignore lawmakers’ requests, the source said, meaning the federal courts would presumably have to render a decision and potentially slow the march toward impeachment.
Trump, in his own tweet, wrote that his efforts to solicit foreign nations to investigate the Bidens have “NOTHING to do with politics.” He said he is only concerned about corruption.
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