More respondents to a poll said they believe then-Vice President Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian officials to get them to not probe his son’s business dealings in the country than those that think it probably didn’t happen.
The rest answered “don’t know.” Some 1,017 primarily independent registered voters answered the question, which was part of a poll conducted from Sept. 23 to Sept. 29 and had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
Biden said last year while speaking at an event that he threatened in 2016 to withhold $1 billion in aid from Ukraine unless then-president Petro Poroshenko ousted the prosecutor in charge of the probe into Burisma.
Biden’s son Hunter Biden sat on the board of the energy company from 2014 to 2019.
“They were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him. I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion,” he continued.
“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 [expletive]. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
A quarter of Democratic respondents admitted they hadn’t seen, read, or heard much about Biden pressuring Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor and another quarter said they'd heard “nothing at all.”
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