Vice President Mike Pence spoke to the Ukrainian president less than a week after the White House finally agreed to release military assistance.
The White House had been delaying the $250 million aid package to Ukraine, and a newly revealed summary of a call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky seems to confirm Democratic suspicions that the resistance was being used as leverage by President Donald Trump to pressure the country to investigate Joe Biden’s family.
Pence spoke to Zelensky over the phone on Sept. 18, six days after the aid package was released under bipartisan pressure, and a little more than two weeks after he and then-national security adviser John Bolton met with the Ukrainian president during a visit to Poland.
“The Vice President spoke by phone today with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to follow up on their productive September 1 meeting in Warsaw and discussed President Trump’s upcoming meeting with President Zelenskyy next week at the UN General Assembly in New York,” the White House said in a readout of the call.
“The Vice President reiterated the United States’ unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the readout adds. “The Vice President commended President Zelenskyy’s administration for its bold action to tackle corruption through legislative reforms, and offered full U.S. support for those efforts.”
According to a readout of the president’s July 25 call, Trump repeatedly asks Zelensky in the July 25 to investigate “corruption” involving the former vice president and his son Hunter Biden, after the president points out how much the U.S. helps Ukraine and then asks the foreign leader for a favor.
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