Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said Friday in an interview that President Trump had the “authority and responsibility” to ask Ukraine to look into corruption that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden may have been involved in.
Cruz told radio show host Hugh Hewitt:
The most important question in this entire trial, and the reason why at the end of the trial the president is going to be acquitted, is can a president investigate corruption? And the answer is obviously yes.
And in fact, if there’s serious evidence of corruption, the president not only has an ability to investigate, a responsibility to do so. Burisma is the largest natural gas company in Ukraine. It was owned and controlled by a Ukrainian oligarch who made billions doing this. It was corrupt through and through, and Burisma had on its board Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden. It was paying him a million dollars a year. And Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point person for Ukraine policy. And he vigorously advocated, he pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor that was investigating and targeting Burisma and the oligarch who had made billions.
And he did all of this while his son was making a million bucks a year. Now whether that is in fact corrupt or not, I don’t know. But it’s at least, it’s enormous evidence to justify investigating, to make whether it’s corrupt, and that’s what President Trump asked the Ukrainians to do, and that was within his authority and responsibility to do.
Cruz also said he thought Democrat House impeachment managers made a “serious tactical mistake” by discussing the Bidens on Thursday, arguing that they did nothing wrong.
“I think yesterday was very consequential, because what they’ve done is they’ve opened the door to Burisma. They’ve opened the door to Hunter Biden testifying,” Cruz said. He went on:
They argued at length yesterday that there is zero basis for any reason to investigate Burisma, that it is completely fake and phony and bogus and without merit. That’s their argument, that the only possible reason to investigate Burisma is illegitimate political motives. That’s simply not the case.
Cruz said he has launched a podcast, called, “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” where he discussed for a half hour “all of the evidence of Burisma corruption that would justify any president saying we need to investigate… I walked through the timeline and the facts.”
Cruz also said Trump had a reason to press Ukraine to look into allegations that Ukraine tried to help Hillary Clinton and hurt him during the 2016 elections:
They weren’t hacking electronically. But they had multiple players throughout their government that were vocally aggressively advocating for Hillary Clinton and attacking Donald Trump in a way that is extremely unusual.
“And it is perfectly legitimate for a president, for a president to press for an investigation as to foreign countries and why they’re interfering in our elections, which is what the President did,” he added.
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