Joe Biden said Tuesday that President Trump should be impeached if the administration does not cooperate fully with ongoing House investigations.
“It is time for this administration to stop stonewalling and provide the Congress with all the facts it needs, including a copy of the formal complaint made by the whistle-blower,” Biden said at 3:30 p.m., an hour later than originally scheduled.
There was no explanation for the delay, but Trump tweeted at 2:12 p.m. that he was going to release a transcript of his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which sparked the whistleblower’s complaint and fueled Democrats’s drive to begin impeachment proceedings.
Despite the delay, Biden’s brief remarks were delivered as his staff had billed them.
“It’s time for the Congress to fully investigate the conduct of this president. The president should stop stonewalling this investigation, and all other investigations into his alleged wrongdoings,” he said from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
“If the president does not comply with such a request of the Congress, he continues to obstruct congress and flaunt the law, Donald Trump leaves Congress in my view no choice but to initiate impeachment. That would be a tragedy, but a tragedy of his own making.”
The former veep painted a withering portrait of Trump as a president who thinks he’s above the law.
“We have a president who believes there’s no limit to his power. A president who believes he can do anything and get away with it. We have a president who believes he’s above the law. Pursuing the leader of another nation to investigate a political opponent to help win an election is not the conduct of an American president,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s demand that Ukraine investigate him and his son Hunter Biden for his role as a board member of a crooked Ukrainian natural gas company.
“It’s an abuse of power. It undermines our national security, it violates his oath of office, and it strikes at the heart of the sworn responsibility of the president,” he continued.
The veteran politician, 76, said he expected that Trump, 73, would attack him.
“I knew when I decided to run this president would attack me and anyone else who he thought would be a threat to his winning again. Well, that’s what he does. That’s what he’s always done,” he said.
And he insisted that neither he nor his son had done anything wrong.
“Even though every respectable publication has looked at the charge made against me and found them baseless and untrue and without merit, that’s not about to stop him,” he declared.
Congressional Democrats called Trump’s pressure on Ukraine’s leader an abuse of power, and charged that Trump was using US aid as a weapon to pressure him into digging up dirt on a political rival.
On Tuesday, the president said he ordered that military aid approved by Congress be withheld because he wanted other European countries to do more to support Ukraine, under threat from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which invaded and later annexed Crimea.
Trump on Tuesday also tweeted about the transcript.
“I am currently at the United Nations representing our Country, but have authorized the release tomorrow of the complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript of my phone conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine,” he wrote on Twitter.
”You will see it was a very friendly and totally appropriate call. No pressure and, unlike Joe Biden and his son, NO quid pro quo! This is nothing more than a continuation of the Greatest and most Destructive Witch Hunt of all time!” he continued, linking the Ukraine controversy with the special counsel’s Russia probe.
Biden, who leads polls in the Democratic race to pick a challenger to Trump in the 2020 election, has said before that impeachment might be necessary if Trump refused to cooperate with ongoing investigations.