Joe Biden, the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, told former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko after the 2016 U.S. election that the Trump administration was disorganized and not prepared to take office.
The New York Post obtained a phone call between Biden, who was then serving as vice president, and Poroshenko dated Nov. 16, 2016. The call took place eight days after President Donald Trump won the election, but Biden said Trump's team was not prepared for the transition period.
"One of the things I've been doing is spending — they are not making the — I'm not being critical, but they, the new administration, the incoming administration has been very, very slow on getting ready for transition. Quite frankly, like most of America, they didn't think they were going to win the election, so they did not have a fulsome transition team. As a matter of fact, they changed their transition team," Biden said.
"Transition is a very, very delicate and precise dance, it goes on from administration to administration over the last 100 years and it requires the exchange of classified information and the like."
Biden continued, "And the people they put forward to be part of the transition have to be cleared to do that, just as we had to be cleared after the Bush administration, etc. They have not done that, they're trying to catch up and do it now since they fired the guy who headed up the transition just last week. The reason I bother to tell you that is I have been somewhat limited on what I am able to tell their team about Ukraine."
Biden and his son Hunter have been accused of having improper ties to Ukraine during Biden's time in office. Hunter Biden was a board member of Ukrainian natural gas producer Burisma Holdings from 2014 to 2019.
Biden told Poroshenko, "The truth of the matter is that the incoming administration doesn't know a great deal about the situation. So I am meeting with the vice president-elect [Mike Pence], who is the only one who has any foreign policy experience.
"I don't plan on going away, I mean as a private citizen I plan on staying deeply engaged in the endeavor that you have begun and that we have begun. … At least that's my objective. That's my objective."
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