Biden rips Giuliani for threatening to investigate his son

Former Vice President Joe Biden lashed out at President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday over his threat to travel to Ukraine in order to pressure authorities in that country to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

In an interview with New Hampshire’s WMUR, Biden called Giuliani’s investigative threats “inappropriate.”

{mosads}“It’s sort of Giuliani’s style and this administration,” said Biden, a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. “It is inappropriate. Unrelated to me, it’s just inappropriate to send your lawyer to a foreign government to try to get them to do something that has no bearing except to try to embarrass.”

Giuliani said he planned to travel to Ukraine to ask officials to investigate whether Joe Biden had once pressured the government there to dismiss a top prosecutor who was investigating a gas company at a time when Hunter Biden sat on the company’s board of directors.

The New York Times has reported that as vice president, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in loans to the Ukrainian government if it did not dismiss the prosecutor, who was ousted shortly thereafter.

In the WMUR interview, Biden said he and his son did not do anything inappropriate and never discussed the case while it was unfolding.

“All the reports indicated that not a single, solitary thing was inappropriate about what my son did,” Biden said. “He never talked to me. He never talked to anybody in the administration.”

“There was no communication with my office,” he added. “We never once spoke about it. It came out of a law firm in New York City that he was working with. He never once asked me. Never discussed anything with me. And with all the investigation that’s been done, there’s not a single piece of evidence that he ever talked to anybody in government about it.”

Giuliani has since called off the trip to Ukraine, but Biden accused him and the Trump administration of using their legal powers for political purposes.

“I can’t remember any lawyer representing the president, conferring with the president, deciding to go overseas, where a government relies on U.S. largesse to try to get them to do something that everybody knows never happened,” Biden said.

Biden is on a swing through New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation primary state. He has opened up a wide lead over the field of Democratic presidential contenders in national and early-state polling.

A Monmouth University survey released last week found Biden at 36 percent support in New Hampshire, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) the next closest contender at 18 percent.