OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former President Donald Trump will likely turn heads again — in both parties — after his latest request from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump, in an interview with the Just the News TV program on Real America’s Voice that aired on Tuesday, cited a 2020 Senate report when he said that Putin should release any information his government has on Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Russian oligarchs.
The report revealed that “Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, then the wife of Moscow’s mayor, provided $3.5 million a decade ago to a company co-founded by President Joe Biden’s son and unanswered questions about why the money was given,” Just the News reported.
“She gave him $3.5 million so now I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it,” Trump noted as part of a wide-ranging interview at his Mar-a-Lago resort home in Florida. “I think we should know that answer.”
Just the News noted further:
A grand jury in Delaware has been investigating Hunter Bjden’s business dealings for possible tax violations, foreign lobbying issues and money laundering. Hunter Biden has acknowledge the probe but denied wrongdoing.
Trump said he also would like to know more about Hunter Biden’s relationship with Ukrainian oligarch Nikolai Zlochevsky, the owner of the Burisma Holdings gas company that hired the Biden scion in 2014 to its board and paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
At the time, the State Department considered Burisma to be a corrupt company that made bribes to Ukrainian officials and viewed Hunter Biden’s relationship as having created the appearance of a conflict of interest because his father, then Vice President Joe Biden, oversaw U.S.-Ukraine policy.
A memo obtained by Just the News in January of this year also revealed that senior State officials were warned that Hunter Biden’s dealing in the country had undercut U.S. anticorruption policies.
“Now, you won’t get the answer from Ukraine,” Trump noted, a reference to his 2020 impeachment over claims he improperly sought that country’s help in probing Biden’s business dealings in exchange for military aid.
“How is it that the mayor of Moscow, his wife gave the Biden family three and a half million dollars? I think Putin now would be willing to probably give that answer,” Trump said. “I’m sure he knows.”
In addition to encouraging Putin to bring forth information he may have on the Biden family’s business dealings, Trump also pointed out that he treated the Russian leader more harshly than Democrats, including by blocking the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, imposing sanctions on the Kremlin, updating the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and building up NATO members’ contributions to the security alliance.
“I’m the best thing that ever happened to NATO, because I made them pay. So NATO has plenty of money now,” he said. “And by the way, that’s another, I’m the one who brought up Nord Stream 2 … . I’m the one that blocked it. I terminated it. They weren’t gonna have it. He (Biden) then opened it.
“And then they say, ‘He’s so nice to Russia.’ I’m the one that put the biggest sanctions on Russia,” Trump added.
Regarding Trump’s first impeachment over Ukraine, a GOP lawmaker from Oklahoma has introduced a resolution in the House to expunge it.
Rep. Markwayne Mullin called Trump’s impeachment “an unimaginable abuse of our Constitution.”
“President Trump was impeached over a sabotaged, perfect phone call,” Mullin said in the press release. “The hearsay of witnesses completely contradicted the plain text of the transcript. Facts did not matter, and Democrats in the House impeached President Donald J. Trump, nevertheless. Now, we have Joe Biden stoking international crises with public comments surrounding the same nation. And Democrats in Congress remain predictably speechless.”
