Tester: Our forefathers would not have tolerated Trump asking Ukraine to investigate Biden

Montana Sen. Jon Tester (D) said on Thursday that the country’s founders would not tolerate President Trump asking Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential campaign. 

“I just think that if in fact that president did ask a foreign country to come in [and investigate a political rival], and influence our elections, I don’t think the forefathers would have tolerated that,” Tester told The Hill’s editor-at-large Steve Clemons at “America’s Veterans: The Next Mission,” which was sponsored by Wells Fargo. 

“So it just says to me that if there’s there-there, we need to react appropriately,” he continued. 

Tester said he’s talked a little bit with his Republican colleagues in the upper chamber since the impeachment hearings, but added that communication was “pretty clammed up.”

Tester’s Republican colleague, Sen. Todd Young (Indiana), was also present at the event and spoke in a separate panel. 

“I’m uncomfortable looking at this through a political lens as you might expect,” Young told The Hill’s editor-in-chief Bob Cusack. 

“So I’m going to let the House do their business,” he continued. “I wish they’d do more business quite frankly. You have one committee focused on impeachment, others could be focused on USMCA, higher education act reauthorization and so forth, but it is what it is.”

House Democrats are investigating Trump’s push for Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. 

The remarks came one day after the first days of public testimony in the House’s impeachment inquiry. 

The top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, William Taylor, revealed in his testimony that U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland told a member of his staff that Trump cared more about an investigation into Biden than he did about Ukraine. 

Trump has repeatedly slammed the inquiry as a partisan “witchhunt.”