Donald Trump has sparked a fight by claiming that he is not averse to the idea of having Joe Biden investigated, according to The Hill .
In an interview with Politico , President Trump said that he has not discussed the possibility with Attorney General William Barr yet, but remains open to the idea.
“Certainly it is a very big issue and we’ll see what happens. I have not spoken to him about it. Would I speak to him about it? I haven’t thought of that. I mean, you’re asking me a question I just haven’t thought of.”
Biden has established himself as an early frontrunner in a crowded field for the 2020 Democratic nomination, and reports suggest that Trump is taking the career politician seriously. Trump has repeatedly called for the investigation of Democratic leaders in response to the Mueller investigation, which he has labeled as a “witch hunt” concocted by congressional Democrats who are not pleased with the fact that he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Trump said that a Biden investigation would “a very big situation” for Democrats, despite claiming that Republican leaders have a lot more scrutiny on them. He said that if Biden was a Republican, the calls for an investigation into his past would have been much louder.
“Because he’s a Democrat it’s about 1/100 the size of the fact that if he were a Republican, it would be a lot bigger,” Trump said.
Trump: It would be “appropriate” for me to talk to Justice Dept about investigating Biden https://t.co/aJ3kdIC0Ex pic.twitter.com/cryRpeZjC0
— The Hill (@thehill) May 11, 2019
Trump’s call for investigating Biden comes after The New York Times published a report last week, which claimed that while Biden was serving as vice president in 2016, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine unless it removed a top prosecutor. The prosecutor was accused of ignoring corruption in his own office and was subsequently voted out. But the most interesting aspect of the report was that Biden’s son, Hunter, served as a board member of an energy company that the prosecutor had been investigating.
The report led to Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, calling for the DOJ to investigate Biden’s family. Giuliani then announced that he would make a personal trip to Ukraine to convince the country’s new president-elect to investigate Biden and the origins of the Mueller investigation. But after congressional Democrats created a furor alleging that they would consider his trip as an example of trying to seek aid from a foreign government, Giuliani canceled his trip.
Recent polls have suggested that Joe Biden could emerge as a serious threat to Donald Trump’s second term in office. In the first poll published since he announced his candidacy, Biden scored six percentage points higher than the president.
