Former President Donald Trump believes one reason President Joe Biden has pushed so hard to send military aid to Ukraine is the money the Biden family received from the country.
Additionally, Trump argued that Biden was “stupid” to reveal to the world that the American military is running low on ammunition because of all it has sent to Kyiv.
“Look at all the money we’re giving to Ukraine. And yet Ukraine was paying the Biden family a fortune,” he told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo in an interview last week that aired Sunday.
An FBI form FD 1023 viewed by members of the House Oversight Committee details allegations from a whistleblower made in 2020 that Joe and Hunter Biden each received $5 million from the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma while Joe Biden was vice president.
During this time, Hunter also received as much as $83,000 a month to serve on the Burisma board of directors. Further, text messages retrieved from Hunter’s infamous laptop reportedly indicate he would turn half the money he made over to his father.
Bartiromo asked Trump whether he would stop the money going to Ukraine.
“I’d get the war settled,” the leading 2024 GOP presidential candidate responded. “The money is — number one, I would tell Europe, ‘You have got to — you’re about $100 billion-plus short, OK? You got to pay.’”
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“Because Europe is smiling all the way to the bank,” he said. “We’re giving all of these — this — Europe is doing very little compared to the United States, and it affects them more. Look, no matter how you look at it, they’re right there. We’re an ocean apart.”
Is Trump correct that Europe bears responsibility for at least matching the U.S. aid to Ukraine?
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“Why are we at $150 billion, and they’re at [$20 billion]?” the 45th president asked. “And, you know, their economy is almost exactly our size, if you add it all up. You add up the countries of Europe, and we have a very similar economy to — they have a very similar to the United States. They should be at the same number that we’re at, if not more.”
The U.S. approved $113 billion in aid to Ukraine in 2022, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
The next-closest contributors are the United Kingdom and Germany, each of which has committed to providing over 10 billion Euros, about $22 billion combined, the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine aid tracker shows.
Multiple other countries have approved sending over $1 billion in aid, but as Trump noted, the combined total is far less than the U.S. commitment.
The European countries “get away with murder,” he recounted to Bartiromo. “And they did with NATO, too. You know what I did with NATO, they weren’t paying, and I made them pay, and took in hundreds of billions of dollars. I said, ‘If you don’t pay, we’re not going to protect you.’”
The former president went on to argue that Biden’s defense policies overall are making the U.S. vulnerable to attack.
“Look, this is the most dangerous time in the history of our country because of weaponry. The nuclear power is so enormous. This isn’t two army tanks going and shooting each other in World War I, World War II, or soldiers standing behind a bunker and shooting people,” he said.
“This is numbers, the likes of — this is obliteration. And we have a man that doesn’t understand what he’s doing. We have a man that yesterday stood up and told the whole world that we have no ammunition,” Trump added.
He told Bartiromo that when he was president, he had “every ammunition building full to the brim.”
“We’ve given it all away,” Trump lamented.
“But if you gave it all away, it’s terrible. The only thing worse than that is to tell the world that we have no [ammunition],” the Republican presidential candidate said.
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“He has told China and these other places that are hostile that we have no ammunition,” Trump continued.
“Think of it. How stupid can somebody be to say that?”
