California
Rep. Devin Nunes predicted on Fox News'
"Sunday Morning Futures" that
Joe Biden's campaign is likely coming to an end -- all because of newly resurfaced reports about his
possible misconduct in Ukraine that "first originated back when Hillary Clinton was trying to make sure Biden didn’t get in the race."
The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee made the claim as The Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll showed Sen. Elizabeth Warren surging ahead of Biden
as the first choice of 22 percent of the voters surveyed, while Biden
was the first choice of 20 percent of the voters. Biden held a 9-point
lead over Warren in the poll as recently as June.
Nunes, speaking
to anchor Maria Bartiromo, said a whistleblower's allegation that
President Trump had acted inappropriately during a July 25 phone call
with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will ultimately backfire, and shine a light on Biden's own possible misconduct. CNN later acknowledged that the whistleblower had no first-hand knowledge of the call, and a top Ukrainian official on Saturday defended Trump's actions.
"These
stories first originated back when Hillary Clinton was trying to make
sure Biden didn’t get in the race," Nunes said. "So now that these have
been resurrected, I don’t know who came up with the scheme -- maybe this
whistleblower really is not a partisan. We want to hear from that
whistleblower, but it sure looks like the scheme has backfired. And,
like I said, it looks like this is the end of Biden’s campaign. I really
do... his lead is basically down to zero."
Late Sunday, Trump echoed Nunes' comments, and emphasized that Biden recently bragged
about pressuring Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor when he was vice
president. At the time, the prosecutor was probing a company closely
linked to Biden's son, Hunter.
"Sleepy Joe Biden ... forced a
tough prosecutor out from investigating his son's company by threat of
not giving big dollars to Ukraine," Trump wrote on Twitter. "That's the
real story!"
Nunes said the ever-deepening schism in the
Democratic Party over whether to impeach the president -- highlighted
late Saturday when New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called it a major "scandal" that Democrats hadn't yet voted to impeach -- would help Trump in 2020.
"The
more I think that they’re out there promoting this kind of craziness
and silliness, the more that the American people are put off, and the
more likely President Trump is reelected,” Nunes added.
There were
parallels, Nunes said, with Democrats' ultimately debunked claims that
the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia to influence the 2016
presidential election.
"This has all the hallmarks of the Russia
hoax," Nunes said. "Something leaks out. ... and then it's the same
reporters that report on it, the same reporters that reported on the
Russia hoax. Then you move forward, and what happens? Then supposedly
they come and testify -- and the night before they testify, the
whistleblower who supposedly doesn't want anybody to know who this
person is, or what information they have, well, it's spilled all over
the pages of the Washington Post" the day before Congress was briefed on
the matter.
"Whoever
came up with this scheme -- it looks like somebody was trying to
deflect what Biden did back in 2015," Nunes said. "This scheme seems to
have backfired on Biden. I mean, Biden's already dropping in the polls."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, speaks during the
EU-Ukraine summit press conference in Kiev, Ukraine, Monday, July 8,
2019. ( AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Trump
had repeatedly asked Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden, the former
vice president's son who had a key role in a natural gas firm that was
being investigated by a Ukrainian prosecutor as part of a corruption
probe.
At a conference two years after he left office, Joe Biden openly boasted about successfully pressuring Ukraine to fire that prosecutor when he was vice president.
Unverified reports circulated on left-leaning media outlets
claiming that Trump could have even promised something improper in
exchange for Ukraine's compliance, although the Journal reported there
was no "quid-pro-quo" involved.
Trump acknowledged Sunday
that he had communicated with Zelensky about Biden, and that the
conversation concerned "the corruption taking place and largely the fact
that we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his son
[contributing] to the corruption already in the Ukraine." However, the
president and top officials maintained Sunday that nothing inappropriate
occurred on the call.
DNI
Inspector General Michael Atkinson said in a Sep. 9 letter to the House
Intelligence Committee that the whistleblower complaint "appeared
credible" and related to an "urgent" matter. But the DNI general counsel
said days later that, after consulting with the DOJ, the matter did not
meet the legal definition of an “urgent concern," and was not subject
to mandatory disclosure to Congress.
“Furthermore, because the
complaint involves confidential and potentially privileged
communications by persons outside the Intelligence Community, the DNI
lacks unilateral authority to transmit such materials to the
intelligence committees,” Jason Klitenic, the DNI general counsel,
wrote.
Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire
will testify before the House Intelligence Committee at an open hearing
on Thursday.
"At that time, we expect him to obey the law and turn
over the whistleblower’s full complaint to the Committee," House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement Sunday
afternoon. "We also expect that he will establish a path for the
whistleblower to speak directly to the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees as required by law."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., suggested Sunday that
impeachment may be on the table, if certain demands are not met ahead of
Wednesday's whistleblower hearing. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Pelosi also seemingly threatened that she would back
impeachment if her demands were not met, in a potentially major shift to
her wait-and-see approach thus far: "If the Administration persists in
blocking this whistleblower from disclosing to Congress a serious
possible breach of constitutional duties by the President, they will be
entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a
whole new stage of investigation."
Trump's conversation came as
the White House was holding up $250 million in military aid for Ukraine.
The president has said he wants European countries to pay more for
their own defense, and denied delaying any military aid funding.
The
whistleblower's allegation could prompt scrutiny of the Obama
administration's Ukraine policy. Joe Biden has explained on camera that
in March 2016, he privately threatened then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that the U.S. would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees from Ukraine if its top prosecutor was not fired.
“I
said, ‘You’re not getting the billion,'" Biden recounted telling
Poroshenko at a Council on Foreign Relations event. "I’m going to be
leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and
said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re
not getting the money.'"
“Well, son of a b-tch, he got fired,"
Biden continued, after assuring Poroshenko that Obama knew about the
arrangement. "And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
It
remained unclear if this was directly tied to the prosecutor's probe
into the company linked to Hunter Biden, as other countries reportedly
wanted the prosecutor out as well.
And earlier this year, The Hill reported
that the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, under the Obama administration, took the
unusual step of pressuring prosecutors there to drop a probe into a
group closely linked to liberal megadonor George Soros.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks at an LGBTQ
Presidential Forum in the Sinclair Auditorium on the Coe College campus
in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Friday, Sept. 20, 2019. (Rebecca F. Miller/The
Gazette via AP)
Then, in April, Ukrainian law enforcement officials said they had a slew of evidence of collusion and wrongdoing by Democrats, and that they have been trying to share this information with U.S. officials in the Justice Department.
A 2017 investigation by Politico found
that Ukrainian officials not only publicly sought to undermine Trump by
questioning his fitness for office, but also worked behind the scenes
to secure a Clinton victory. Trump told Fox News that the allegations of possible Clinton-Ukraine collusion were "big" and vowed they would be reviewed by the DOJ.
Additionally, attention focused anew on President Obama's hot-mic comment to then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at
a nuclear disarmament summit in March 2012, in which Obama was
overheard saying he would have more "flexibility" to negotiate with
Russia after the November 2012 election.
"The longer we talk about
what the Bidens did in Ukraine, the better," said Barry Bennett, a
former Trump campaign adviser, who dismissed those who believe Trump
will pay a political price for the latest controversy.
Meanwhile, Biden on
Saturday denied he has ever spoken to Hunter about his business in
Ukraine and called Trump's actions an "overwhelming abuse of power."
“Trump’s
doing this because he knows I’ll beat him like a drum, and he’s using
the abuse of power and every element of the presidency to try to do
something to smear me,” Biden told reporters in Iowa.
But Trump, on Sunday, pointed out that Biden's claim was seemingly inaccurate. Hunter Biden told the New Yorker previously that he and his father had spoken “just once” about it.
“And now he made a lie when he said he never spoke to his son,” Trump said. “Of course you spoke to your son!”
Trump
added: "No quid pro quo, there was nothing. It was a perfect
conversation. ... The conversation I had was largely congratulatory,
with largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place and largely
the fact that we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his
son creating the corruption already in the Ukraine and Ukraine has got a
lot of problems. The new president is saying that he's going to be able
to rid the country of corruption, and I said that would be a great
thing, we had a great conversation."
Trump went on to say the
latest allegations are "just as ridiculous as the others," branding it
"the Ukraine Witch Hunt" — a nod to former Special Counsel Robert
Mueller's Russia probe.
"Will fail again!" Trump tweeted.
Fox News' Ronn Blitzer, Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo and The Associated Press contributed to this report.