Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, without talking about a call he had gotten from President Donald Trump, expressed concern about whether he should be listening to officials from his re-election campaign, Sen. Chris Murphy, who traveled in early September with Sen. Ron Johnson to Ukraine, said Wednesday.
"President Zelenskiy had never held office before," the Connecticut Democrat recalled on CNN's "New Day." "He was very confused about whether they should be listening to the U.S. Embassy or the campaign advisers who were making these demands on them about investigations."
Murphy said he'd heard earlier in the spring that Trump's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, had been making overtures to the Ukrainian government, and part of the reason he wanted to travel to Ukraine was to make sure the Zelenskiy government understood that it should be dealing with the United States through the State Department and embassy, not the reelection campaign.
"I did raise with him the general problem of communicating with the president's campaign representatives, and he did separately represent great concern about the aid being cut off," said Murphy. "It was only after I left that I found out that the president had raised this issue directly with him, the desire to enlist Zelenskiy in the re-election effort personally on that phone call."
He added that Johnson, R-Wis., told Zelenskiy that as far as he understood, the aid was cut off because of corruption in Ukraine and Trump's belief that other European countries should be footing the bill to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian aggression.
Murphy said it's also a concern that Giuliani claimed in an interview Tuesday that he was investigating Biden at the behest of the State Department.
"When I was in Kiev, I asked the State Department if they had been involved in any of the back channel communications with the Zelenskiy government trying to get them to interfere in the 2020 election," said Murphy. "They told me they weren't. So now we have a question of how deep this goes in the State Department. How many people in the State Department were trying to pressure the Zelenskiy government to destroy Vice President Biden and his family?"
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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