Biden Should Have Seen All These News Clips Before Claiming No Credible Coverage of Own Ukraine Scandal
Joe Biden doesn’t take lightly to any assertion that maybe, just maybe, he shouldn’t have put pressure on the Ukrainians to fire a prosecutor who had investigated a company that just happened to have given his son a position on its board.
No, you can’t question the fact that Biden bragged about using his position as vice president to tell the Ukrainians that unless prosecutor Viktor Shokin was axed, they wouldn’t be getting $1 billion in aid from the United States.
Nor can you question why Hunter Biden — who had as little experience in the Ukrainian energy industry as he did with passing drug tests — had been given a $50,000-a-month sinecure with a company called Burisma.
Nor can you insinuate that the vice president had a conflict of interest in the matter.
No, Joe Biden didn’t even think about Burisma when he forced the Ukrainians to fire Shokin; the move was only made because the prosecutor was inept and corrupt. As for Hunter Biden, his hands were as clean as his urine was not. And if you insinuate otherwise, Uncle Joe gets mad.
After President Donald Trump had said that “it was disgraceful where [Biden] talked about billions of dollars that he’s not giving to a certain country unless a certain prosecutor is taken off the case,” the former veep responded angrily.
“Not one single credible outlet has given any credibility to his assertions, not one single one,” Biden said at a campaign stop in Iowa last Friday, according to ABC News. “So, I have no comment except the president should start to be president.”
Apparently, Joe Biden hasn’t been watching “one single credible outlet” for quite some time now, as GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel noted when she tweeted this video out:
Yesterday, Joe Biden said that “Not one single credible outlet has given any credibility” to the reports that his son had shady business dealings while Joe was VP.
Then what does he call this?pic.twitter.com/Lo65bHowyx
— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) September 21, 2019
In fact, it was an outlet I think most of the left finds exceptionally credible — The New York Times — that reported on Hunter Biden’s ties with Burisma almost four years ago.
“When Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveled to Kiev, Ukraine, on Sunday for a series of meetings with the country’s leaders, one of the issues on his agenda was to encourage a more aggressive fight against Ukraine’s rampant corruption and stronger efforts to rein in the power of its oligarchs,” the Dec. 8, 2015 report read.
“But the credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.”
Apparently, reporting from this credible (or at least credibly liberal) outlet couldn’t convince Biden that maybe he had a conflict of interest when it came to meddling in Ukraine, especially when it came to Burisma.
Just a few months later, Biden would push for the ousting of prosecutor Viktor Shokin.
The official line is that Shokin was disreputable and ineffectual. How true this was will be a matter of debate in the months to come, but no matter how disreputable and ineffectual a prosecutor may be, if he’s ever looked into your son’s business dealings, you probably shouldn’t get him fired.
Or brag about doing so, for that matter.
Biden, of course, did both:
“I said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden said at a 2018 event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a b—-, he got fired.”
Those could end up being the most damaging words to ever come out of Joe Biden’s mouth that weren’t written by Neil Kinnock. And, as you can see from the clip McDaniel tweeted, the pressure that Biden exerted was covered by a number of credible news outlets.
In short, this is a blatant lie on Biden’s part — unless, of course, he’s calling the establishment media “fake news.” I thought that Democrats were forbidden from doing that. Democracy dies in darkness and all that jazz.
You can think whatever you want about whether or not President Trump should have broached the issue with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. However, to say there’s nothing rotten in the state of Ukraine when it comes to either Joe or Hunter Biden is patently false.
What it is we don’t know, but the screw-up sons of U.S. vice presidents usually don’t just obtain jobs on the boards of major energy companies with no experience, and their dads typically refrain from getting law enforcement officials who’ve investigated said companies fired.
Could this just be poor judgment on both their parts? Absolutely. But despite what Uncle Joe might say, it’s poor judgment that credible media outlets have covered in the past — and there’s a parade of clips that can attest to that.
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