On Sunday, Fox News’s Chris Wallace asked a Trump campaign senior adviser a very straightforward question: would the 2020 Trump campaign accept foreign assistance in the impeached president’s bid for reelection. But Jason Miller, who appeared on the broadcast, did not give a straightforward answer. Instead, he told the host it was a “silly question.”
“The folks who have actually taken foreign assistance were the Clinton campaign,” Miller added, deflecting from the original query. When Wallace pressed Miller for an answer he finally conceded, “There is no foreign assistance that’s happening in this campaign.”
Though Miller suggested that the question of foreign assistance was foolish, it’s been well reported that during the 2016 Trump campaign, Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, now a senior adviser within the administration, did in fact meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer after they were promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Outside of that infamous meeting on June 9, 2016, Trump, on more than one occasion, publicly asked a foreign country to investigate his then-opponent Hillary Clinton.
Fast forward to 2019, Trump was impeached on the grounds that he sought to use U.S. foreign aid and the Ukrainian government to damage Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. In a July 2019 phone call, Trump explicitly asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to “look into” the former Vice President and his son Hunter. Earlier this year, it was also confirmed that Trump had sent his attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine, with a motive to get Ukrainian officials to probe the Bidens.
Miller appeared to ignore this when answering Wallace’s question on foreign assistance. But he did ask the host to pose the same question to Biden if Wallace ever secures an interview with the candidate. The Trump campaign has been highly critical of Biden’s run for president, even before it was announced that he was the presumptive Democratic nominee. Now that Trump is trailing the former senator from Delaware, attacks on his character and the election process as a whole, appear to be ramping up.