Former Vice President Joe Biden hit back at Rudy Giuliani’s recently nixed plan to travel to Ukraine to lobby for an investigation of the 2020 Democratic candidate’s son, Hunter Biden.
“It is inappropriate,” Biden told New Hampshire’s WMUR-TV for a report Tuesday. “Unrelated to me, it’s just inappropriate to send your lawyer to a foreign government to try to get them to do something that has no bearing except to try to embarrass.”
Giuliani, who is President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, said Friday that he had canceled his planned visit to Ukraine, telling Fox News in a vaguely worded explanation that he feared “walking into a group of people that are enemies of the president ― in some cases, enemies of the United States.”
Trump and his supporters have criticized Hunter Biden’s work from 2014 to last month as a board member for Ukranian energy firm Burisma Holdings, which paid him up to $50,000 monthly, according to The New York Times. Joe Biden, during the final year of the Obama administration, advocated for the firing of Ukraine’s former prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, who was leading corruption probe of the company.
Despite conflict-of-interest concerns, there is no evidence Biden was doing his son a favor.
“All the reports indicated that not a single, solitary thing was inappropriate about what my son did,” the former vice president told WMUR. “He never talked to me. He never talked to anybody in the administration.”
He condemned Giuliani for plotting the Ukrainian trip, and said the antic fits the “style” of the lawyer and the Trump administration.
“I can’t remember any lawyer representing the president, conferring with the president, deciding to go overseas, where a government relies on U.S. largesse to try to get them to do something that everybody knows never happened,” Biden said.
Trump told Politico earlier that it would be “appropriate” for him as president to discuss a probe of Biden or his son with Attorney General William Barr, but hadn’t done so.