Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore said Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden is "afraid" to confront allegations that, while vice president, he may have pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a top prosecutor who was investigating a gas company that employed his lobbyist son Hunter.
During an interview Tuesday on MSNBC, Moore was asked about his thoughts on Biden, whom President Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani want to be investigated for potential conflicts of interest.
“Joe Biden is this year’s Hillary," Moore said. "Joe Biden is not going to excite the base to get out there and vote on Nov. 3, 2020. Seventy percent of the people voting next year are either women, people of color, or young people between the ages of 18 and 35. That’s 70%. Who is going to excite that 18-to-35-year-old person? Who is going to excite women and African Americans and Hispanic people?”
Narrowing his critique down to the Ukraine matter, Moore suggested Biden would rather ignore it as much as possible.
“But your question was, 'What about Biden in this last week and why does he seem to be — he’s there, and he’s not there. And he needs to be more there,'" Moore said. "The things that he said publicly are very strong. But it looks like he’s not really wanting to deal with it. It appears, if I could just now speak from Michigan, it appears that he doesn’t want — he’s afraid to be out there, that there’s some piece of this that he doesn’t want to deal with in terms of his son and the gas company and all that."
Moore said this is "OK" because "it’s been proven that nobody did anything wrong."
"If he’s embarrassed that the kid of a politician got some help, well, I don’t think anybody sitting there at home right now with their TV dinner going, 'What? Joe Biden’s son got a good job out of this?' I think we sort of understand," he added.
Over the weekend, the Biden campaign sent a letter to several networks demanding they stop booking Giuliani because he “will knowingly and willingly lie in order to advance his own narrative.” Biden himself has said there is no "credibility" to the claims of corruption.
Giuliani told the Washington Examiner the Biden camp wants to silence him because they are afraid of the questions he is raising about the former vice president and his son. "All they're trying to do is kill the messenger and silence the messenger. But they're not answering the message," he said.
Earlier this year, Moore, a vocal Trump critic and proponent of impeaching him, said the only person who could "crush" Trump in the upcoming election is Michelle Obama. Another liberal figure, HBO host Bill Maher recently suggested that "Ukraine swampiness" should force Biden to drop out of the 2020 race.