GOP's witness says accusations against Biden 'didn't seem credible'


Kurt Volker, whom Republicans called to testify, said that Trump's demand for Ukraine to investigate Biden was 'inappropriate' and 'unacceptable.'

House Republicans were dealt another set back on Tuesday in their quest to defend Donald Trump from impeachment, when one of their own witnesses said Trump's demand for Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden was inappropriate.

Kurt Volker, the former United States envoy to Ukraine, said in his opening statement that he "rejected" the conspiracy theory pushed by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that Biden acted inappropriately when he helped oust Ukraine's former prosecutor general — a man GOP lawmakers also wanted to be forced out. Giuliani and Trump have wrongly claimed that Biden corruptly tried to push the former prosecutor general out because the prosecutor general was investigating Biden's son Hunter.

"The accusation that Vice President Biden was acting inappropriately didn’t seem at all credible to me," Volker told the committee Tuesday.

Volker finds himself in hot water over his own role in trying to force Ukraine into investigating the Bidens by withholding critical military aid to Ukraine.

Volker initially testified in early October that Trump wasn't withholding the military aid to Ukraine in order to force the country to investigate Biden.

However, ahead of his public testimony on Tuesday, Volker amended his testimony to say that he now realizes that the aid was conditioned on investigations into the Bidens, and that condition was "unacceptable."

"In hindsight, I now understand that others saw the idea of investigating possible corruption involving the Ukrainian company, 'Burisma,' as equivalent to investigating former Vice President Joe Biden," Volker said in his opening statement. "I saw them as very different — the former being appropriate and unremarkable, the latter being unacceptable. In retrospect, I should have seen that connection differently, and had I done so, I would have raised my own objections."

Republicans have been arguing that Trump didn't commit an impeachable offense because the aid to Ukraine was ultimately released, and Ukraine never announced an investigation into the Bidens.

However, even the GOP's own witness says that the effort itself was "inappropriate" and "unacceptable."

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.