One of President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense lawyers tried to paint Joe Biden and his son Hunter as corrupt at the Republican convention on Tuesday.
For Joe Biden, the U.S. has “been the land of opportunism, not opportunity,” said Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general.
She then took aim at Hunter Biden, whose job at a Ukrainian energy company was key aspect of the impeachment trial. Trump had asked the Ukrainian president to “do us a favor” and give information about Biden and his son to Attorney General William Barr.
Bondi repeated Trump’s debunked claim that Biden wielded his influence as vice president to benefit Hunter’s bosses. She said Joe Biden used U.S. foreign aid to engineer the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor who’d investigated the company.
“Joe Biden — the vice president of the United States — threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless that same prosecutor was fired…and then he was fired,” Bondi said.
She neglected to mention that the probe into the company was dormant at the time, and that numerous Western countries had wanted the prosecutor gone because he was soft on corruption.
The Biden campaign issued the same statement it had used about the allegations during the impeachment trial.
Andrew Bates, the Biden campaign’s rapid response director, said, “Here on planet Earth, the conspiracy theory that Bondi repeated has been conclusively refuted. Joe Biden was instrumental to a bipartisan and international anti-corruption victory. It’s no surprise that such a thing is anathema to President Trump.”
Bondi, who made other vague allegations about other unidentified Biden family members in her speech, maintained that the people who’ve benefited from Biden’s political career “are his family members, not the American people.”
“As a career prosecutor and former attorney general of Florida, I fought corruption and I know what it looks like, whether it’s done by people wearing pinstripe suits or orange jumpsuits,” said Bondi, whose office dropped a fraud probe into Trump University after the Trump Foundation donated $25,000 to a political group connected to Bondi when she was A.G. Bondi has denied there was any connection.
Trump was impeached by the House for abuse of power involving Ukraine. Democrats said there was ample evidence that Trump had abused his power by pressuring Ukraine to announce investigations into Biden and his son while withholding almost $400 million in aid, and that he had obstructed Congress by refusing to release any documents related to his actions. Trump was acquitted after a Senate trial.
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