Harris on Trump’s Call With President of Ukraine: ‘Once Again, No Collusion’
On Tuesday, all seven Democrats in Maryland’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives rushed to issue statements condemning President Trump for his controversial call with the president of Ukraine and suggesting that an impeachment inquiry, at the very least, was appropriate.
But the state’s lone congressional Republican, Rep. Andrew P. Harris, was silent on social media, and his press office produced no public statements. He did, however, appear on “The PBS Newshour” Tuesday night, where he was highly critical of Democrats’ plans to launch an impeachment inquiry.
Harris said the Democrats are merely looking for excuses to bruise the president, just as they did with the Mueller investigation. “This is nothing new.”
Harris also echoed Republicans’ calls for an investigation into former vice president Joe Biden and whether he sought to withhold military aid for the Ukraine while his son was doing business there. Harris declined to comment on what he called “hypotheticals” when asked about Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying he would wait until a transcript of their conversation was released Wednesday.
Soon after the White House released a summary of the Trump-Zelensky conversation from July, Harris released a link to it on Facebook with the terse remark, “Once again, no collusion.”
He enumerated a short time later:
“None of the allegations that Speaker Pelosi made yesterday are proven by the transcript of the conversation between President Trump and President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and the White House is also preparing to release to Congress the whistleblower complaint based on this same telephone conversation,” Harris said in a statement. “The transcript of the call is clear, and everyone should read it for themselves. Once again, no collusion.
“In fact, for similar transparency, former Vice President Biden should release the transcripts of his conversations pressuring the Ukrainian government to fire its top prosecutor who led an investigation into a Ukrainian company that employed Biden’s son as an extremely highly paid consultant. Speaker Pelosi should also either stop this partisan impeachment inquiry because of the lack of evidence, or bring it before the full House of Representatives for a vote.”
Josh Kurtz
Founding editor
Founding Editor Josh Kurtz is a veteran chronicler of Maryland politics and government. He began covering the State House in 1995 for The Gazette newspapers, and has been writing about state and local politics ever since. He was an editor at Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, for eight years, and for eight years was the editor of E&E Daily, which covers energy and environmental policy on Capitol Hill. For 6 1/2 years Kurtz wrote a weekly column on state politics for Center Maryland and has written for several other Maryland publications as well. Kurtz regularly gives speeches and appears on TV and radio shows to discuss Maryland politics.
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