Washington, D.C. - "I love Joe Biden, but I can tell you, if the name was Trump, there'd be a lot of questions asked," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said of the Biden-Burisma scandal Thursday in the Senate ahead of day two of opening arguments in the impeachment trial against President Trump.
“I love Joe Biden...but if this had been Trump, there’d be a lot of questions asked.” #ImpeachmentTrial #impeachment pic.twitter.com/CatDjuxy2z
— Cortney O'Brien (@obrienc2) January 23, 2020
"Why are you paying Hunter Biden?" Graham asked. "You can say they're corrupt, but they're not stupid."
Hunter Biden sat on the board of Burisma for years and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars. When the company was being investigated for corruption, Hunter's father and then-Vice President Joe Biden reportedly pressured Ukraine to fire the lead prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Biden and President Obama's supporters insist they were trying to root out corruption in Ukraine.
"Does it make sense to hire the son of the guy in charge of the portfolio for the American government?" Graham wondered.
These are the questions that the press should be asking, he said.
"Nobody, particularly in your business," Graham said, referring to the group of reporters in front of him, "has done much looking into what happened in Ukraine with Hunter Biden."
Sen. ?@LindseyGrahamSC? asks why the press aren’t doing more to investigate Hunter Biden. #ImpeachmentTrial pic.twitter.com/gPVKkfjDNs
— Cortney O'Brien (@obrienc2) January 23, 2020
President Trump asked Ukrainian President Zelensky during a July phone call to investigate the Bidens' ties to Burisma and it jumpstarted the impeachment inquiry against him. The whistleblower complaint alleged that Trump had threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine if they didn't investigate the Bidens. The aid was ultimately released, and the White House says that Trump was not politically motivated and that he was trying to tackle corruption.