Vice President Mike Pence sat down with Fox News’ host Sean Hannity on Monday where he slammed the mainstream media over its coverage of the Ukraine controversy.
Critics have been relentless in their condemnation of President Trump over a whistleblower’s complaint about the context of a phone call between the president and newly elected Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky — while ignoring allegations of unsubstantiated wrongdoing by former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Pence told Sean Hannity, as per Fox News.
“Here we go again. The ‘assume the worst media’ takes one report, runs with it. Democrats on capitol hill immediately start to denounce the President, before anybody has the facts,” Vice President Mike Pence said.
Pence explained that President Trump has been “very clear” about the phone call with the Ukraine leader. “He made a congratulatory call to President Zelensky after his election, which was a landslide election– built largely on the message of an anti-corruption campaign,” he noted.
The Vice President said that President Trump spoke with Zelensky about the United States’ concern of investing millions of American’s taxpayer dollars and seeing him move a reformed agenda. “President Trump made it clear that we’ve got to see reforms, we’ve got to see honesty in government and his congratulatory call was all about that.”
Pence said that the Commander in Chief mentioned former vice president Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, in the context of us “wanting to see [an] honest government” adding, “That’s exactly what the taxpayer would expect.” (Continued Below)
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion,'” Biden recounted telling Poroshenko at a Council on Foreign Relations event. “I’m going to be leaving here in– I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.'”
“Well, son of a b—h, he got fired,” Biden continued, after assuring Poroshenko that Obama knew about the arrangement. “And, they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
Asked why a United States Vice President would want to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor, referring to Biden, Pence replied, “It’s really remarkable that everything the media wants to assume about the President’s phone call in July, that Vice President Biden admitted to on camera, in January of 2018– that he said when he was Vice President of the United States he had a quid-pro-quo. He said to Ukrainian officials, ‘You will not get over a billion dollars in American aid unless you fire a prosecutor’, who just happened to be investigating a company that Vice President Biden’s son was on the very board of.” (Continued Below)
Pence continued, “To have a Vice President threatening U.S. aid, that’s a quid-pro-quo. If people want to see a quid-pro-quo, they just need to watch the tape of Vice President Biden and explaining that he was gonna withhold again, over a billion taxpayer dollars.”
“The American people deserve to know the facts. But what they can be confident of is throughout this process, that all of our administration’s contacts, the President’s conversation, all of my discussions with President Zelensky were all based upon proper considerations of how we support Ukraine, how we support their effort to end an era of corruption in their government and advance the interest of their sovereignty,” Pence said.
“The American people have a right to know what happened. They have a right to know what happened in 2016 and they have a right to know what the circumstances were around having a sitting vice president threaten to withhold American aid,” he stated.
“The ironic thing is is that everything that our critics in the media are leveling at the President from this phone call, and leveling at our administration, everything that Democrats on Capitol Hill are running off and describing — Vice President Joe Biden bragged about — which was a quid-pro-quo — withholding American aid in exchange for a specific action,” Pence said. (Video Below)
Pence concluded it’s a decision for the President to release the transcript of the phone call with Zelensky. “That would be an unprecedented act. It’s so important that the President of the United States can have conversations with leaders around the world that are candid, that are open. And for leaders to be concerned in the future that a conversation with the President might make its way into the public would undermine the ability of the President to have those discussions in the future,” he explained.
Vice President Mike Pence’s full remarks:
