In the same Fox News interview, Mr. Hannity asked President Trump whether America needed to see the purported evidence possessed by the unnamed Ukrainians noted in Mr. Solomon’s piece. The President replied, invoking Attorney General William P. Barr:
- Well, I think we do. And, frankly, we have a great new attorney general who has done an unbelievable job in a very short period of time. And he is very smart and tough and I would certainly defer to him. I would imagine he would want to see this. People have been saying this whole—the concept of Ukraine, they have been talking about it actually for a long time. You know that, and I would certainly defer to the attorney general. And we’ll see what he says about it. He calls them straight. That’s one thing I can tell you.148
Ukraine’s current Prosecutor General Ruslan Ryaboshapka, who assumed his new position in late August 2019, told The Financial Times in late November 2019 that Attorney General Barr had made no contact regarding a potential investigation into allegations of wrongdoing by former Vice President Biden.149 In an apparent reference to President Trump’s demand for Ukrainian interference in U.S. elections, Mr. Ryaboshapka stated: “It’s critically important for the west not to pull us into some conflicts between their ruling elites, but to continue to support so that we can cross the point of no return.”150
President Trump Promoted False Information About Former Vice President Joe Biden
In early May, Mr. Giuliani continued his outreach to President-elect Zelensky and promoted the need for Ukrainian investigations into former Vice President Biden that served President Trump’s political needs.
On May 2, at 6:21 a.m. Eastern Time, President Trump retweeted a link to an article in The New York Times, which assessed that Mr. Giuliani’s efforts underscored “the Trump campaign’s concern about the electoral threat from the former vice president’s presidential campaign” and noted that “Mr. Giuliani’s involvement raises questions about whether Mr. Trump is endorsing an effort to push a foreign government to proceed with a case that could hurt a political opponent at home.”151
Later that evening, in an interview with Fox News at the White House, President Trump referenced the false allegations about the firing of a corrupt former Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, that Mr. Giuliani had been promoting. He was asked, “Should the former vice president explain himself on his feeling in Ukraine and whether there was a conflict … with his son’s business interests?”152 President Trump replied:
- I’m hearing it’s a major scandal, major problem. Very bad things happened, and we’ll see what that is. They even have him on tape, talking about it. They have Joe Biden on tape talking about the prosecutor. And I’ve seen that tape. A lot of people are talking about that tape, but that’s up to them. They have to solve that problem.153
“The tape” President Trump referenced in his interview was a publicly available video of former Vice President Biden speaking in January 2018 at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a nonpartisan think-tank focused on foreign policy matters. During an
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