Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano put some distance between himself and many of his Fox colleagues when it comes to President
Donald Trump seeking assistance from a foreign leader in the upcoming
election, describing it as an “act of corruption” that is the “most serious charge” yet against the president.Appearing Monday on the Fox Business Network, Napolitano—who warned in June that Trump was “prepared to commit a felony to get re-elected—was asked by host David Asman about the ongoing controversy surrounding a whistleblower’s complaint surrounding Trump’s communications with Ukraine.“Who is in more trouble here,” Asman declared. “The president who had this phone call with the Ukrainian leader or
Joe Biden who actually did have a quid pro quo with regard to
Ukraine when he was vice president?” (The Ukrainian prosecutor general said in May that there is no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden or his son Hunter.)“I think this is the most serious charge against the president, far more serious than what Bob Mueller dug or dragged up against him,” Napolitano noted. “If there was a quid pro quo—it does appear as though a quarter of a billion dollars in defensive weaponry was held back for a period of time while these eight conversations were going on between the president.”Asman, meanwhile, pointed to a Wall Street Journal report noting that the July call between Trump and the Ukrainian president didn’t reveal a specific quid pro quo.“So if you are the President of the
United States and you are making a conversation that you know your intelligence community is listening to,” the judge replied. “Of course you’re not going to articulate a quid pro quo. You’ll just make the quid pro quo happen.”Trump, for his part, essentially admitted to threatening to withhold aid to Ukraine on the call if they didn’t investigate “corruption,” apparently referencing Biden and his son, telling reporters on Monday that “if you don’t talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?”Asman pivoted to Biden, claiming the former vice president voiced a “direct quid pro quo” when he threatened to withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee—at the behest of several Western countries—if Ukraine didn’t dismiss its then-prosecutor general Viktor Shokin for corruption. The Fox Business host parroted Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s accusations that Shokin was actively investigating Hunter Biden’s company at the time of his dismissal, an assertion that has long been debunked.Napolitano agreed that while “this is probably the end of Joe Biden’s presidency” hopes, it “doesn’t diminish one iota what the current president is doing.”“If it is true, we haven’t seen the whistle-blower complaint and under the law it has to be revealed, if this is true this is an act of corruption,” the Fox analyst exclaimed.