President Donald Trump suggested Sunday that he raised former Vice President Joe Biden and Biden's son in a summer phone call with Ukraine's new leader, as Democrats pressed for investigations into whether Trump improperly used his office to try to dig up damaging information about a political rival.
Trump told reporters that the July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was "congratulatory" and focused on corruption in the East European nation. In his remarks to reporters, he then raised Biden as an example, although there is no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden or his son Hunter, who was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
"It was largely the fact that we don't want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine," Trump said as he left the White House for a trip to Texas.
Biden, who is among the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination, accused Trump of making a baseless political smear.
The matter has sparked a fierce debate over whether Trump misused his office for political gain and whether his administration is withholding from Congress critical information about his actions. The incident is part of a whistleblower complaint, but the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, has refused to share details with lawmakers, citing presidential privilege.
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has resisted calls for impeachment for other alleged Trump transgressions, said Sunday that unless Maguire provides information to Congress, administration officials "will be entering a grave new chapter of lawlessness which will take us into a whole new stage of investigation."
Another impeachment holdout so far, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" that "we may very well have crossed the Rubicon here."
Biden said in Iowa on Saturday that "Trump deserves to be investigated" for "trying to intimidate a foreign leader, if that's what happened." Biden said Trump was motivated by politics "because he knows I'll beat him like a drum." A leading Republican senator urged the Justice Department to investigate the "Biden-Ukraine connection."
"We have looked at all things Russia and Trump, his family, everything about his family, every transaction between the Trump campaign and Russia," Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told Fox News Channel's "Sunday Morning Futures." Now is the time, he said, to know "what relationships, if any, did Biden world have to the Ukraine."