Trump campaign doubles down on Biden-Ukraine allegations in new TV ad
BY TAL AXELROD
The Hill
09/27/19
President Trump’s reelection campaign launched a new television and digital ad Friday accusing former Vice President Joe Biden of misconduct over his dealings with Ukraine, an effort to go on the offensive against the Democratic presidential candidate.
The ad will appear on national cable outlets and digital platforms starting Sunday and will run for a week. It is backed by $10 million, including $8 million from the campaign and another $2 million from the Republican National Committee (RNC).
“Democrats want to deny Americans the opportunity to vote to re-elect President Trump and people need to know the facts,” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement. “This is a Joe Biden scandal and the Democrats are trying to use it to steal the election.”
The advertisement focuses on Biden’s efforts as vice president to have Ukraine dismiss a top prosecutor in 2016. At the time, the prosecutor was investigating a natural gas company on whose board his son Hunter Biden sat.
No evidence has emerged to suggest Biden was acting with his son’s interests in mind, and the former vice president has said he pushed for the prosecutor's firing over what he says were insufficient efforts to tackle corruption in Ukraine.
“Joe Biden promised Ukraine $1 billion if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son’s company,” a narrator says in the ad. “But when President Trump asks Ukraine to investigate corruption, the Democrats want to impeach him.”
“They lost the election. Now, they want to steal this one. Don’t let them,” the narrator concludes, showing a graphic of Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016.
The ad comes as Republicans play defense after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday announced that the House would launch a formal impeachment inquiry amid wide scrutiny over Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
A memorandum of a July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shows Trump suggested Kiev probe Biden over his role in lobbying for the prosecutor’s dismissal.
“There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great," Trump said on the call, according to the memo released by the White House. "Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.”
A declassified version of a whistleblower complaint that first sounded the alarm over the conversation says “multiple White House officials with direct knowledge” of the call expressed concern that Trump was using his office for his personal political gain.
The complaint also revealed the White House sought to bury a transcript of the call and that a future phone call or meeting between the two presidents “would depend on whether Zelensky showed willingness to ‘play ball.’ ”
Biden has repeatedly railed against Trump over the incident, slamming it as an “abuse of power” that could lead to impeachment based on the House’s findings. Many Republicans on Capitol Hill, however, have sought to defend the president, saying there is no explicit quid pro quo expressed in the call or complaint.
