Volker told Giuliani he didn’t believe Joe Biden had done anything improper.
Volker dismissed the idea that Joe Biden pushed Ukraine’s government to oust a prosecutor to benefit his son Hunter, an allegation that has been fueling much of the conservative pushback against the impeachment process.
And Volker said he tried to convince Giuliani to let that notion go at breakfast on July 19.
“He was repeating all of the things that were in the media that we talked about earlier, you know, firing the prosecutor general and his son being on the company and all that,” Volker said. “And I said to Rudy in that breakfast the first time we sat down to talk that it is simply not credible to me that Joe Biden would be influenced in his duties as vice president by money or things for his son or anything like that. I’ve known him a long time. He’s a person of integrity, and that’s not credible."
Volker says that at the time, he wasn’t equating Burisma with Biden.
Volker’s testimony indicates that there were so many different events happening that he didn’t always make the links that can seem obvious in retrospect.
For instance, he says he was fine with the idea that Ukraine’s government would release a statement that mentions the gas company Burisma and the 2016 election as matters they would investigate as part of an anti-corruption effort, and that he even helped propose language.
But, although he admits he knew that Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma, he didn’t quite think through the implications. Those implications later became clear when the White House released a transcript of a July 25 call in which Trump urged Zelensky to investigate the Bidens.
“In my mind, those are three separate things,” Volker explained to lawmakers. “There is Bidens; there is Burisma as a company, which has a long history; and there is 2016 elections.
“And part of what I was doing was making sure and why I wanted to make sure I was in this conversation that we are not getting the Ukrainians into a position about talking about anything other than their own citizens, their own company, or whether their own citizens had done anything in 2016.”