US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said on Saturday that “President Donald Trump won’t destroy me or my family over the latter’s call for an investigation against the former Vice President and his son”.

Trump’s request for an investigation into the Bidens, directed to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a July 25 phone call, has resulted in an impeachment inquiry against the American leader launched by the House Democrats, Xinhua news agency reported.

Biden made his comments during a campaign swing through Nevada after days of internal debate among his advisers over how best to refute unsubstantiated claims by the president and his personal lawyer that Biden improperly assisted his son’s business ventures in Ukraine and China.

In the speech, the former vice president said that the attacks on his family were intended to divert attention from the widening impeachment enquiry into Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens – and he cited them as proof that the White House feared him more than any other Democratic presidential contender.

“Let me make something clear to Trump and his hatchet men and the special interests funding his attacks against me: I’m not going anywhere”, Biden said.

Later, in the month of August, a whistleblower complaint filed by an unidentified intelligence official alleged that Trump asked Zelensky during the call to probe Biden and his son Hunter, who once worked for Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings that was accused of corruption.

There has so far been no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens.

However, the former Vice President, during an event on January 2018 at the Council on Foreign Relations, bragged about how he in 2016 successfully persuaded the Ukrainian authorities to sack the country’s then prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma Holdings at the time.

Trump claimed that his intent to scrutinize the Bidens was out of concerns over corruption, not politically motivated or aimed at sabotaging the former Vice President’s presidential campaign.

In a letter to Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Cummings, Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel ordered that the documents should be produced by October 18.

The subpoena came after the three committees separately sent a letter earlier on Friday seeking documents from Vice President Mike Pence as part of their investigation.

(With IANS inputs)