Biden: Trump’s effort to ‘smear’ me ‘a tragedy for this country’

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden ripped into President Trump on Wednesday, saying Trump tried to “smear” him in his dealings with Ukraine after the White House released a memo showing that Trump had asked Kiev to investigate the former vice president.

Biden, the current front-runner in the 2020 Democratic primary, released a lengthy statement Wednesday afternoon blasting Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying, “It is a tragedy for this country that our president put personal politics above his sacred oath.”

“The 2,000-word summation of a 30-minute phone call released by the White House makes clear that days after the President ordered the delay of Congressionally-appropriated military assistance to Ukraine, he implored the President of Ukraine to work with his personal attorney to manufacture a smear against a domestic political opponent, using a malicious conspiracy theory that has been universally debunked by every independent outlet that has looked at it,” he said.

{mosads}Biden weighed in after the White House released a five-page memorandum of a July 25 call in which Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Biden’s role in the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was probing a natural gas company on whose board his son Hunter Biden sat.

No evidence has emerged that Biden was acting with his son’s interests in mind, and the former vice president has repeatedly pushed back on Trump’s allegations.

Concerns over Trump’s request that a foreign power investigate a political rival, as well as allegations among some Democrats that Trump leveraged military aid to Ukraine to convince Zelensky to open an investigation, led to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) announcement Tuesday that the House would open a formal impeachment inquiry into the president. 

While Biden never mentioned impeachment by name, he endorsed the House’s efforts to hold Trump “accountable.”

“Congress must pursue the facts and quickly take prompt action to hold Donald Trump accountable,” he said in his statement. “In the meantime, I will continue to focus my campaign not on how Donald Trump abused his power to come after my family, but on how he has turned his back on America’s families.”

Though Biden’s lead in the Democratic primary field has narrowed, with some polls showing him falling behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the former vice president has trained much of his campaign’s ire on Trump with an eye on the general election.