away corruption within their energy companies and their clois ties to the government their close ties to the government. it was convenient at the time when the guy we were fingering to leave did because among his other duties was that relationship with the companies one of which had joe biden s son on its board. isn t it fair to get the light out on both? you are absolutely right that congress was conditioning some of the aid to ukraine based upon progress being made fighting corruption. corruption s been a serious problem within ukraine and has very little to do with the russian interference. it is a problem of governance within its own country and was probably the leading reason for the change in government during the last election. so yes, i think we need to have transparency. i m not opposed to transparency as to what happened under the previous government. neil: all right. real quickly, committing more troops to the region, in light of the whole saudi arabia iran dust-up, what
along came the election with this guy, who is now running ukraine, the same guy this president called to argue for this. i m saying there might be a perfectly good reason for investigating corruption. neil: if he made the call, would that bother you? i mean that call no, if the motive was to find out why joe biden in his own words was using taxpayer dollars to leverage a prosecutor s firing in ukraine, i think that is a valid claim to ask the new president of ukraine who vowed to eliminate this type of corruption. there are a couple of issues that are important here. there are hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to a democratic ally in the region that was held up because of this. according to wall street journal reporting, president trump not just asked once, allegedly eight times and it was so serious when it was going on the potential crimes being extortion, conspiracy to commit extortion and conspiracy to violate federal election law, a whistle-blower someone who is now
giuliani to be trashed and by quoting biden s own words. neil: he said it was perfectly fine for the president to do this and he didn t believe the president did it, i don t know the law part of it but the smell test we often have to translate some of the president s tweets. neil: i was having trouble enough translating giuliani on this. he said that the government should investigate corruption of joe biden s son. this does involve the high level the highest really the vice president level of u.s. government involvement with ukraine, a quid pro quo, and if you take just that on its face, why wouldn t the president be concerned about a corruption? neil: a guy that could be the opponent. what was going on in the ukraine at the time, other western governments were looking into ukraine and how corrupt it was.
credibility of these allegations, and certainly we would love to hear from the president. giuliani sort of underscores this by saying it is true. so we have information here that needs to be followed. i was listening to your debate in regards to the issues going back to 2015. ukraine at that time had serious corruption problems. there s no question about that. the prosecutor had serious corruption problems. so the credibility at that time is very much in question. but i agree, transparency is important. neil: do you worry, though, that we we are not getting that side? you re right there might be nothing to it just as the trump folks said there s nothing to this, nothing untorrid or salacious but we were holding up a billion dollars for ukraine at the time in the obama biden administration. now, to be fair, many western powers were thinking about shelving any more financial support for ukraine until and unless they crack down on the corruption that was rampant in the country, including