Sen. Ron Johnson said he is “sympathetic” to President Donald Trump’s rationale for freezing military aid to Ukraine, and he never heard it tied to a Biden investigation
Trump paused the aid in mid-July, days before a phone call with Zelensky in which Trump asked for investigations into the Biden family and what happened in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He relented and released the aid two months later amid bipartisan pressure from Congress and after a whistleblower complaint alleged he abused his power in freezing it to begin with.
The president has repeatedly denied the aid was contingent upon Ukraine announcing the investigations for which Trump asked, but testimony given to impeachment investigators in the House hasBut Johnson dismissed testimony from administration officials asserting that when Trump and his allies referred to fighting corruption in Ukraine, it was more specifically assumed to mean the Biden and election interference investigations.
“That is their impression,” Johnson said, adding: “I've never heard the president say, ‘No, I want to dig up dirt on a potential 2020 opponent.’” As for the investigation Trump had asked for into election interference, Johnson argued the request stemmed from a “human desire” by Trump to get to the bottom of why the first half of his first term in office had been bogged down by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling and possible collusion by the Trump campaign.
But while there are several federal investigations ongoing into the origins of the Russia probe, Trump’s requests have focused on debunked conspiracy theories surrounding the 2016 election, namely that Ukraine was the real perpetrator of the interference rather than Russia, as the entire U.S. intelligence community has concluded.
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