Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) called for a probe into four Democratic Senators on Sunday over a letter that they sent to Ukraine in 2018 that threatened to withhold aid from the country if it did not continue to investigate President Donald Trump.
When asked by left-wing “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd about whether he was concerned over Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s interaction with Ukraine, Paul responded, “If anything is consistent here it’s that both parties have tried to involve themselves in Ukraine. So for example, four senators, Democrats, wrote a letter to the Ukrainian government and said, ‘If you don’t keep investigating Trump we may reconsider our bipartisan support for your aid.’ Both parties seem to be doing this.”
Speaking on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, Paul said, “I don’t really know enough about what he’s doing. I knew he traveled over there to try to seek information on Hunter Biden’s corruption. I think a lot of Americans see the $50,000 a month Hunter Biden was making and it doesn’t pass the smell test. I think most people do think there was some corruption involved with Hunter Biden. And I hope we do get to the bottom of it.”
“If you’re going to condemn Trump you need to condemn the Democrat senators. It shouldn’t be just one-sided,” Paul concluded. “Everybody’s going after President Trump. Someone needs to actually, in an objective way, evaluate a letter from four Democrats that said to Ukraine, ‘If you don’t keep investigating Trump we will reconsider our bipartisan support for aid.’ That’s a threat. And that’s the same kind of stuff they’re accusing Trump of. But nobody’s talking about that the Democrats are doing exactly the same thing.”
Paul’s remarks about the four Democratic Senators who wrote a threatening letter to Ukraine comes from an article in The Washington Post which noted that three Democratic Senators – Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) – “wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe.”
“In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake,” the article continued. “Describing themselves as ‘strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine,’ the Democratic senators declared, ‘We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,’ before demanding Lutsenko ‘reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.'”
The fourth Democratic senator to whom Paul was referring was Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy.
In September, The Hill’s John Solomon wrote that Murphy “delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky” that “Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.”
“The implied message did not require an interpreter for Zelensky to understand: Investigate the Ukraine dealings of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and you jeopardize Democrats’ support for future U.S. aid to Kiev,” Solomon concluded.
WATCH:
Rand Paul: “Four senators, Democrats, wrote a letter to the Ukrainian government and said, ‘If you don’t keep investigating Trump we may reconsider our bipartisan support for your aid … Someone needs to actually, in an objective way, evaluate [the] letter … That’s a threat’” pic.twitter.com/59kyjIN46N
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) October 13, 2019