Saturday October 5, 2019
The Chinese foreign minister turned down Trump's request to investigate Joe Biden.
China distanced itself from President Donald Trump’s impeachment scandal on Friday, a day after Trump called on the country to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
“We trust that the American people will be able to sort out their own problems,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Friday. The statement was publicized in the state-run Global Times.
Hours after Trump told reporters in front of the White House that “China should start an investigation into the Bidens,” CNN on Thursday reported that Trump had raised the “political prospects” of the former vice president and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — two Democratic presidential candidates — while on a call with Chinese President Xi Jinping in June.
In a July phone conversation, after he had halted military aid to Ukraine, Trump pressured that country’s president to investigate Biden and his son. That exchange is now the focus of a House impeachment inquiry.
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) slammed Trump’s appeal to China. “Americans don’t look to Chinese commies for the truth,” Sasse told the Omaha World-Herald Friday. “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.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) also lashed Trump for inviting yet another foreign country to interfere in American politics.
“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,” he tweeted.
Former acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates tweeted Friday that she believes Trump invited both Ukraine and China to investigate Biden in comments aired on national TV in order to “hypnotize” the American people and normalize the actions
Federal Election Commission Chair Ellen Wientraub reiterated in a tweet Thursday that it is illegal to accept foreign help in an American election.
Weintraub, who did not mention Trump by name, tweeted the same information in June after the president told ABC News that he would consider accepting damaging information on a political rival from a foreign national.