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Lindsey Graham Wants Justice Department To Look into Biden's Ukraine Dealings

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Sen. Lindsey Graham is pushing questions Democrats don’t want to hear.

With the mainstream media pack still chasing the current “controversy” over the contents of a July phone call between President Donald Trump and the president of Ukraine, the South Carolina Republican is adding his voice to the chorus of those who want to know more about a topic Democrats don’t want to talk about.

And he wants the Justice Department to get in on the action.

In an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday, as reported by The Hill, Graham, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, said the phone call uproar gives a good opportunity to revisit dealings between Ukraine and former Vice President Joe Biden. According to a May report in The New York Times, Biden pushed Ukraine in 2016 to oust a prosecutor who was closing in on an energy company called Burisma Holdings, for which Biden’s son, Hunter, was a board member pulling down a salary of about $50,000 a month.

Ukraine was already a factor in the Trump presidency because of its role in the trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who worked as a political consultant in Ukraine for almost a decade starting in 2006, according to an NBC News report from June 2017.

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Manafort is now serving combined sentences of more than seven years for tax and bank fraud, conspiracy and other charges.

With Biden as the front-running candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, his family’s dealings with Ukraine deserve the same level of scrutiny Trump’s alleged dealings with Russia have received, Graham said.

Graham noted that Biden is already on record having bragged about getting a Ukraine prosecutor fired from his job.

“So here’s the deal. All things Trump have been looked at regarding Russia. Now it’s time for all things Ukraine to be looked at,” Graham told Hewitt, according to a transcript of Monday’s show.

Should the Justice Department investigate the Bidens' activities in Ukraine?

“I like Joe Biden. I’ve been a friend of his for a very long time,” the senator said. “But we can’t have two standards here. The prosecutor was looking at things in the Ukraine, and he got fired, and there’s all kind of allegations about the Ukraine dumping information into the legal system and political system in 2016 about Manafort and others, you know, Hunter Biden, what kind of situation did he have financially?

“I’m hoping somebody will take a look at all things Ukraine like they did with Russia from the Department of Justice.”

It was a message Graham took to Fox News on Sunday, when he told “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo that “nobody’s looked at Ukraine and the Bidens.”

“Joe Biden said everybody’s looked at this and found nothing,” Graham said. “Who’s everybody?

“Nobody’s looked at the Ukraine and the Bidens. Nobody’s looked at the role the Ukraine played in the 2016 election. Do you think the media in America would really look at it and report on it if there was something bad for the Bidens? Or [Ukraine] unduly interfered with the 2016 election?”

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Graham said he’s “calling for someone in the Justice Department to look at all things Ukraine.”

“We’ve looked at all things Russia and Trump,” he said. “His family, everything about his family, every transaction between the Trump campaign and Russia.”



That’s the kind of scrutiny Democrats have invited. And it’s the kind of scrutiny they’ve spent almost three years proving they deserve by endlessly howling about empty allegations of corruption in the Trump administration.

Graham isn’t the first to call for an investigation into the Bidens and their activities in Ukraine, and he won’t be the last.

Because it’s almost a rule of political life that when hypocritical Democrats are accusing their political opponents of anything, they’re almost infallibly guilty of it first.

Their accusations of “collusion” involving Trump and Russia have come to nothing — it will be interesting to see if similar attention about Democrats and Ukraine will turn out something more substantive.

Did Joe Biden use his position as vice president to benefit his son and his son’s employers?

Graham, with his powerful position in the Senate, is in a position to get that side of the story out.

And it’s likely a story Democrats won’t want to hear.

CORRECTION, Sep. 23, 2019: An earlier version of this article stated Hunter Biden’s Burisma salary incorrectly. It was $50,000 a month.

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
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