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Hours after United States President Donald Trump described him as “stone-cold crooked,” Joe Biden, former US vice president and a leading Democratic contender and in the 2020 race for the White House has vowed the Republican president is “not going to destroy me.”
“Let me make something clear to Trump and his hatchet men and the special interests funding his attacks against me,” Biden said in prepared remarks distributed by his campaign in advance of an appearance in Reno, Nevada, on Wednesday night.
“I’m not going anywhere. You’re not going to destroy me. And you’re not going to destroy my family. I don’t care how much money you spend or how dirty the attacks get,” said Biden, who leads in most opinion polls among the 19 Democrats seeking their party’s nomination to face Trump in next year’s election.
The back-and-forth came as Trump, first in a series of tweets and then at a news conference, angrily denounced an impeachment inquiry concerning a July call in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian company while his father was vice president.
Democrats have accused Trump of pressuring a vulnerable U.S. ally to meddle in the 2020 election for his own political benefit.
On Wednesday, Trump insisted that he had acted appropriately, and called Biden and his son “stone-cold crooked.”
Meanwhile, Trump yesterday called on another nation to probe former Biden: China. “China should start an investigation into the Bidens,” Trump said in remarks to reporters outside the White House.
Trump said he hadn’t directly asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to investigate Biden and his son Hunter but said it’s “certainly something we could start thinking about.” Trump and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have also tried to raise suspicions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China, leaning on the writings of conservative author Peter Schweizer. But there is no evidence that the former vice president benefited financially from his son’s business relationships.
The president’s reference to China came unprompted in an unrelated question about the July 25 Ukraine call and moments after he was asked about trade negotiations with China to end a yearlong trade war that has been a drag on both nation’s economies.
“I have a lot of options on China, but if they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous, tremendous power,” Trump said.
He later alleged without evidence that China had a “sweetheart deal” on trade with the U.S. because of the Bidens.
“You know what they call that,” Trump said. “They call that a payoff.”
