An adviser to the Ukraine president claims talking about the Bidens was a condition of getting a call with President Donald Trump, but it might have been a move orchestrated by a Ukrainian rival of the adviser, ABC News reported.
"It was clear that Trump will only have communications if they will discuss the Biden case," Serhiy Leshchenko, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy who had been alleged to play a role in the origins of the Russia investigation, told ABC News. "This issue was raised many times. I know that Ukrainian officials understood."
The memo of notes of the call was released by the White House on Wednesday, showing President Trump asked for Ukraine to work with Attorney General William Barr and lawyer Rudy Giuliani in investigating potential corruption of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
"I'm sorry, but I don't want to be involved in . . . elections of USA," Zelenskiy told ABC News after a Wednesday meeting with President Trump at the U.N. General Assembly in New York. "No, you heard that we had, I think, a good phone call. It was normal, we spoke about many things, and you read it that nobody pushed it, nobody pushed me."
Instead, according to Leshchenko, then-prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko leveraged a potential investigation into the Bidens to Giuliani as an effort to "curry favor with the Americans," according to the report.
Lutsenko was removed from his post this summer, and Leshchenko claimed the investigation of the Bidens was an attempt for Lutsenko to save his job.
"We understood that he was just trying to protect his position in the new administration using this scandal," Leshchenko told ABC News. "And he put Ukraine on this battlefield."
Leshchenko, as alleged by Lutsenko and Giuliani, might have played a role in the origins of the Russia investigation into President Trump, but now he wants Ukraine to appear neutral in the U.S. election process, per the report.
"The best way for Ukraine is to be neutral," Leshchenko told ABC News. "Ukraine has done nothing wrong."