Former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign released a blistering statement on Thursday calling President Trump “unfit” to lead the nation after revelations that Trump urged the Ukrainian president to open an investigation into Biden and his family.
Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, called Trump “one of the most divisive, unfit individuals to occupy the Oval Office in our nation’s history.”
“His willingness to sell out our national interest for his personal gain endangers our security and his attempts to cover it up put the stability of our democracy at risk,” Bedingfield said.
The remarks come after a dramatic week in which the House moved forward with impeachment hearings over revelations Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate Biden’s efforts in 2016 to push for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor.{mosads}
Republicans have alleged that Biden sought the prosecutor’s ouster to protect his son, Hunter, who was on the board of directors for a Ukrainian natural gas company that was under investigation for corruption.
However, the Obama administration has said it sought to have the prosecutor dismissed because he was not doing enough to root out corruption in Ukraine and there is no evidence of wrongdoing on behalf of Biden or his son.
Biden is a top contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and the House is investigating whether Trump was illicitly seeking to influence the election by going after one of his main political rivals.
“It is all borne from his deep, fully substantiated fear that Joe Biden will beat him in November 2020,” Bedingfield said in her statement Thursday.
A declassified whistleblower complaint released earlier in the day alleged that Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani had been running a shadow investigation into Biden’s dealings in Ukraine and that the White House sought to cover his tracks.
The complaint states that White House officials sought to bury the transcript between Trump and the Ukrainian president, directing that they be put on a secure system typically used to store especially sensitive information.
“Today we have confirmed that President Trump’s efforts to have a foreign country intervene in our domestic politics were not confined to a single call, but instead part of a larger, months-long campaign,” Bedingfield said.
Trump and his allies insist that there was nothing improper about Trump asking for an investigation into Biden.
And they say the president did not threaten a quid pro quo by threatening to withhold military aide from Ukraine unless the country went after Biden, as some have suggested.
There were no allegations in the whistleblower complaint that Trump himself ordered officials to hide the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president.
Still, Bedingfield pointed to Trump’s remarks at a private fundraiser in New York on Thursday morning, in which he accused the whistleblower of being “close to a spy.”
“I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy,” Trump said. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”
Bedingfield called this “a thinly veiled threat” to “execute the national security professionals who followed their oath to uphold the Constitution by bringing this to light.”
“We need to restore trusted leadership at home and dignified statesmanship abroad to rebuild America’s reputation, and that is why we need to replace Donald Trump with Joe Biden,” Bedingfield said.