A day after former Vice President Joe Biden scored a series of dramatic primary victories on Super Tuesday to become the Democratic presidential frontrunner, President Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud during an interview with sycophantic Fox News host Sean Hannity: He’s going to make Biden’s son a central part of his campaign against the ex-veep.
Appearing on Hannity’s primetime show Wednesday night for another rambling friendly phone chat, the president first made sure to praise the Fox host—who’s been described as the White House shadow chief of staff—and other network personalities who’ve shown him sufficient loyalty and obsequiousness.
After getting that out of the way, Trump was asked about Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) suddenly announcing on Wednesday that he’ll be ramping up the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s investigation into Hunter Biden and his employment with Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Johnson said an interim report would be released within a couple of months.
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“It has to be a campaign issue,” Hannity said. “How do you plan to use it or do you plan to use it?”
Trump, just weeks after his Senate impeachment acquittal over charges that he withheld military aid in order to pressure Ukraine to announce an investigation of a domestic political rival, replied that he would absolutely make Biden’s son a major campaign issue.
Complaining that Democrats in the primary didn’t use the Ukraine scandal against Biden early in the primary, the president asserted that “wouldn’t happen with the Republicans, I can tell you.”
“That will be a major issue in the campaign,” Trump added. “I will bring that up all the time because I don’t see any way out for them. I don’t see how they can answer those questions. I hope they can, I’d actually prefer it that they can’t but I don’t believe they will be able to answer those questions. That was purely corrupt.”
During Johnson’s announcement of the new phase of his investigation, he told reporters that “these are questions that Joe Biden has not adequately answered” and he’d “want these questions satisfactorily answered” if he were a Democratic primary voter.
Kellyanne Conway, meanwhile, initially dodged the question on Fox News earlier in the night, telling Martha MacCallum, “Well, we don’t run investigations here out of the White House like that, the Congress does,” before going on to preview the campaign's attacks on Hunter Biden.
