Edited by: JV Staff
Taking to Twitter on Saturday, Trump blasted Utah Senator Mitt Romney for his sharp critique of his now controversial telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
“Mitt Romney never knew how to win. He is a pompous ‘ass’ who has been fighting me from the beginning,” Trump wrote of his fellow Republican on Twitter.
Trump once again defended as “appropriate” a July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, which has triggered a House of Representatives impeachment inquiry, and said his call for China to investigate Biden and his son Hunter was linked to corruption, not politics, as was reported by the Jerusalem Post.
“If Mitt worked this hard on Obama, he could have won. Sadly, he choked!” Trump wrote. “He is so bad for R’s.”
On Friday, Romney said that Trump’s actions on the investigation of Biden were “wrong and appalling.”
“When the only American citizen President Trump singles out for China’s investigation is his political opponent in the midst of the Democratic nomination process, it strains credulity to suggest that it is anything other than politically motivated,” Romney said on Twitter on Friday. “By all appearances, the president’s brazen and unprecedented appeal to China and to Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden is wrong and appalling.”
Foreign interference in elections has long been viewed as a threat to U.S. sovereignty and the integrity of democracy. Soliciting foreign help in an election is also illegal.
AP reported that Vice President Mike Pence made clear he backed the president and believes he is raising “appropriate” issues. Other allies agreed.
“I don’t think there’s anything improper about doing that,” GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said of Trump’s call on China to investigate the Bidens.
Sen. Ben Sasse said in a statement to the Omaha World-Herald: “Americans don’t look to Chinese commies for the truth. If the Biden kid broke laws by selling his name to Beijing, that’s a matter for American courts, not communist tyrants running torture camps.”
Some Republicans appeared eager for the controversy to simply not exist. “I don’t think it’s a real request,” AP reported that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a prominent China critic, told reporters Friday, “I think he did it to get you guys. I think he did it to provoke you to ask me and others and get outraged by it.”
AP reported that Rubio later tried to clean up his statement with a tweet. “Before we nullify the results of an election or dismiss some very serious accusations as an attempted coup, maybe it would be a good idea to try and gather all of the facts & then give some thought to what would be in the best interest of our country.” His reference to “coup” theories was a backhanded chastisement of Trump, who has used that term to describe the investigation.
