Appearing Wednesday on The Hill’s Rising, pro-impeachment Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) accused President Donald Trump, without evidence, of ordering Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to “manufacture dirt” on 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden during a July phone call.
A partial transcript is as follows:
KRYSTAL BALL: If you are drawing up the articles of impeachment today, what do they say?
REP. TED LIEU: If the evidence from the whistleblower is true, there are a number of violations. The first is the American president getting a foreign power to meddle in our elections. That is unconstitutional and illegal, it’s also a violation of campaign finance laws. In addition, if the whistleblower complaint is correct — that Donald Trump had delayed military aid in order to extract leverage to get the Ukrainian leader to investigate Trump’s political opponent — that would be another article of impeachment that would look just like bribery. And third, depending on whether or not the White House provides the whistleblower’s complaint in full, it is illegal for them not to provide it in full. The law’s very clear that you must provide this complaint to Congress.
SAAGAR ENJETI: The underlying problem here was, of course, Hunter Biden receiving $50,000 a month from a Ukrainian energy company. Do you think that is evidence of corrupt behavior?
LIEU: No, people sit on boards, they get monetary payments and what evidence actually shows is the Ukrainians actually looked into this, terminated the investigation and found nothing there. So this is just made up, which is also very troubling because you have the American president essentially asking the Ukrainians to manufacture dirt on a political opponent because there really was not evidence of corruption.
Contrary to Lieu’s claim, Biden is on video bragging about threatening to withhold $1 billion from Ukraine if the government did not fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma Holdings.
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