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Bloomberg
President Donald Trump is planning about a dozen one-on-one meetings with foreign leaders next week at the United Nations General Assembly, but none may be more anticipated than his Wednesday session with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Interest in those talks stems from a whistleblower complaint filed by a US intelligence official after Trump and Zelensky spoke by phone earlier this year. On the call, Trump pressed Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Democratic lawmakers have accused the White House of stonewalling their requests for more information about concerns raised in the complaint, which the Washington Post reported involved an unnamed official raising questions about the president’s dealings with Ukraine.
Trump said he had done nothing inappropriate in his phone calls with foreign leaders, and dismissed the whistle-blower complaint—which he said he hadn’t seen—as “highly partisan.†But the president refused to answer questions about whether he had encouraged Zelensky to investigate Biden, whose son Hunter served on the board of directors of a Ukrainian energy firm.
Democratic lawmakers said the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, pressured Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son over their past dealings with the country and suggested that the administration threatened to withhold security assistance to the country.