On the same day that legal experts and political opponents proclaimed that President Donald Trump engaged in “blatantly impeachable” offenses—and that even the White House-approved “not-a-transcript” released earlier in the day was itself a “smoking gun” of flagrant violations of campaign finance laws—the president offered rambling, quasi-coherent to the press late Wednesday afternoon as he tried to defend himself for asking the Ukraine president to investigate his 2020 rival Joe Biden.
“Impeachment? For that?” Trump said during the press conference in New York.
Asked directly by a reporter if it was appropriate for a sitting U.S. president to ask the leader of a foreign nation to look into his political rivals, Trump said, “I didn’t do it.”
The call with President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump continued, was “perfect” and a “beautiful conversation.”
When it was put to him as a hypothetical—if his predecessor Barack Obama had done something similar to him—Trump falsely claimed that this is something that actually did happen.
Throughout Trump’s comments he repeatedly accused—again without providing any evidence—that Biden, and his son Hunter Biden, were involved in some kind of corruption in Ukraine—a charge that has not been substantiated but continues to be boldly peddled by Trump, Republican lawmakers, and others in the right-wing echo chamber.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT