Morning Joe hosts slammed former presidentDonald Trump on Wednesday for asking Vladimir Putin to release “dirt” about Hunter Biden’s alleged business dealings in Eastern Europe, a request he made during an interview with journalist John Solomon on the Just the News television show.
During the interview with the conservative news programme, Mr Trump pushed the unproven claim that Hunter Biden received a $3.5m (£2.66m) payment from Elena Baturina, the widow of late Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and continued to suggest that said payment was part of an agenda to curry favour with the then Democratic presidential candidate.
MSNBC co-host Mika Brzezinski began the weekday morning programme by fact-checking that claim by first pointing out that a “nonpartisan Senate report published just weeks before the 2020 election, which also focused on Biden’s role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma” found no evidence of any wrongdoing.
Brzezinkski continued debunking the president’s other unsupported claims, citing a Reuters report that found that the Russian president has previously said he knows “nothing criminal in Hunter Biden’s past business ties with Ukraine or Russia”.
The panel of Morning Joe Hosts then tucked into eviscerating the former president’s remarks made during the interview, aired on the Real America’s Voice network.
“Not only did Donald Trump watch the horrors of what we’re seeing in Ukraine and say, this is ‘genius’ and say, this is ‘wonderful,’” MSNBC co-host Willie Geist began.
“But now he is taking the side of Vladimir Putin and saying let’s exploit how Putin feels about the United States right now, and get him to give me this invented dirt that came out of a report authored by Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.”
All MSNBC hosts agreed that while they found it difficult to be “shocked” by the former president’s actions, they still found themselves “galled” by his latest comments.
“Vladimir Putin is committing war crimes!” Jonathan Lemire said. “The United States has deemed that Putin and the Russian soldiers committed war crimes; and yet, Trump is asking him for help. It is truly staggering.”
This isn’t the first time that Mr Trump has tapped foreign governments for assistance in furthering his unverified claims.
The MSNBC hosts noted how this recent incident echoed the events in 2016, where Mr Trump, just months before the presidential election that he would go on to win, asked Russia to release emails he alleged that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was withholding to prevent damaging information being leaked about her ahead of the November election.
And then again, while acting as US president, he attempted to blackmail Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into President Biden’s son, Hunter, for the time he worked as a board member for Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Underscoring the contrast between the current administration and the previous one, the Morning Joe hosts went on to highlight how “Vladimir Putin is committing war crimes … and yet Trump is asking him for help”.
“It is truly staggering,” Lemire went on to add.
