Ukraine’s top prosecutor said Thursday that he had no evidence of wrongdoing by former Vice President Joe Biden, who has been accused by allies of President Trump, including Donald Trump Jr., of corrupt dealings in the country.
In an interview with Bloomberg News on Thursday, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said Biden’s son Hunter Biden and his former company Burisma were not the targets of investigations by his office and said that he had no evidence that the vice president’s demand for Ukraine to dismiss the country’s former prosecutor general was related to investigations into Burisma.
“I do not want Ukraine to again be the subject of U.S. presidential elections,” Lutsenko said Tuesday in his office in Kiev. “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws — at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing. A company can pay however much it wants to its board.”
{mosads}Trump Jr. and other conservatives questioned whether Joe Biden demanded the resignation of former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin at a time when Shokin was investigating Burisma. Hunter Biden was a board member of Burisma at the time.
Shokin was the target of his own corruption allegations at the time, and The New York Times reported that Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in loans to the country if he was not ousted from office. He has maintained to reporters that the investigation into Burisma and his son’s business dealings in the country were never discussed either with U.S. or Ukrainian officials.
“All the reports indicated that not a single, solitary thing was inappropriate about what my son did,” Biden told New Hampshire news station WMUR. “He never talked to me. He never talked to anybody in the administration.”
“There was no communication with my office,” Biden 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.”
President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani recently canceled plans to travel to Ukraine in an attempt to investigate the matter, which Biden called “inappropriate.”
“It’s sort of Giuliani’s style and this administration,” he said. “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.”