White House hopeful Beto O’Rourke accused President Trump of using “propaganda” to attack fellow Democratic candidate and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden.
Mr. O’Rourke, a former congressman for Texas, called out Mr. Trump on Twitter Friday after the president’s reelection campaign released an attack ad characterizing Mr. Biden as corrupt.
“Trump’s ad about Joe Biden is a disgrace. Every one of us needs to call this exactly what it is: propaganda. Doing anything less is playing right into his hands,” Mr. O’Rourke tweeted.
Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign announced earlier Friday that $10 million is being spent on ads highlighting how Mr. Biden had threatened, while vice president, to withhold U.S. funding for Ukraine unless it fired its top prosecutor at the time, Viktor Shokin.
Mr. Shokin had been investigating a company with business ties to Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, when he was eventually dismissed in 2016, and Mr. Trump has accordingly accused the former vice president of having pressured Ukraine to protect his son.
Mr. Trump acknowledged earlier this week that he asked newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a July phone call to investigate the Bidens. The White House tried to suppress a related whistleblower complaint, and Democrats within the House of Representatives responded by accusing Mr. Trump of abusing his power as president and launching an official impeachment investigation.
The attack ad released by Mr. Trump’s campaign this week alleges Democrats are trying to “steal” the 2020 election by removing Mr. Trump from office.
Mr. Biden’s campaign responded in a statement later Friday, saying the ad shows that Mr. Trump is “in a panic” and knows Mr. Biden “would beat him like a drum.”
Several recent nationwide polls have listed Mr. Biden as a front-runner among more than a dozen candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Several have also placed him as likely beating Mr. Trump in a hypothetical head-to-head contest.
Virtually all major recent nationwide polls have placed support for Mr. O’Rourke below 5%, meanwhile.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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