Joe Biden To Jimmy Kimmel: It’s “Hard To Avoid” Conclusion That Trump Committed An “Impeachable Offense”

Joe Biden, appearing on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live on Wednesday, said that “it seems to me it’s awful hard to avoid the conclusion” that President Trump committed “an impeachable offense and a violation of constitutional responsibility.”

“I am confident in the ability of the House and Senate to deal with this,” Biden said. “My job is to just out and flat beat him. What I can’t let happen I can’t let this distract me in a way that takes me away from the issues that really are the reason why I’m running.”

Biden was commenting on the White House release of the non-verbatim transcript memo of a call that Trump had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July.

According to the transcript memo of the call, Trump asked Zelensky to start an investigation of Biden and his son, Hunter. Hunter Biden held a directorship of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, when his father was vice president. That raised ethical concerns at the time, but according to Politifact, there is no evidence that Biden talked to his son in a substantive way about the company or that his call to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor was an effort to end an investigation into Burisma.

In his interview, Biden pointed to other aspects of the phone call, including Trump’s request that Zelensky speak to his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr about investigating the Bidens.

“The idea that someone would call a head of a foreign state, ahead of time withhold significant military aid that’s badly needed in order to prevent the Russian separatists who are in Ukraine, from taking over Ukraine, and then ask basically, ‘Can you cooperate with Rudy Giuliani? He’s coming over,'” Biden told Kimmel. “And the thing I learned, the thing we all learned recently, in that statement, that 2,000 word statement released, was talked about getting the Justice Department engaged in this. It’s such a blatant abuse of power that I don’t think it can stand.”

Kimmel asked Biden, “How does this rank as far as on the outlandish scale for you the last 48 hours watching this transpire?”

Biden responded, “18 out of 10. This is kind of bizarre and you know, it’s Rudy Giuliani is a great character witness the president has.”

“It’s like his body has been taken over by another being,” Kimmel quipped.

Photos: ABC/Randy Holmes