As Dems Refuse To Act, Ukraine Moves Against Biden, Opens Own Corruption Investigation
The Ukrainian government has opened an investigation into Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged role in orchestrating the firing of the country’s top prosecutor in March 2016.
The move came in response to a court order issued after former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin filed a complaint last month with the National Bureau of Investigation demanding an investigation be opened.
Shokin’s attorney, Oleksandr Teleshetsky, told The Washington Post, “They need to investigate this. They have no other alternative.”
“They are required to do this by the decision of the court. If they don’t, then they violate a whole string of procedural norms,” Teleshetsky said.
According to The Post, Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center confirmed the probe was underway. Its director explained that by going to the court, Shokin’s attorneys essentially forced the bureau of investigation to act.
Shokin reportedly charged in his complaint that Biden pressed for his firing as a bid to protect the then-vice president’s son, Hunter Biden.
“Throughout the last months of 2015 and the first months of 2016 Joseph Biden, taking advantage of his position, came several times on official visits to Ukraine in order to negotiate with the leaders of the country my eviction and, consequently, the closing of the objective investigation into the offenses committed by persons associated with the company ‘Burisma Holding Limited’ (Cyprus), including the son of the aforementioned US official,” Shokin’s complaint reads.
Hunter was believed to be making at least $50,000 a month and possibly upward of $83,000 a month to serve on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma at the same time his father was the Obama administration’s point man for U.S. foreign policy regarding Ukraine.
At a Council on Foreign Relations event in January 2018, Biden bragged about an official visit he took to Ukraine in December 2015 during which he demanded then-President Petro Poroshenko fire Shokin or not receive $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in,’ I think it was, ‘about six hours.’ I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko.
“Well, son of a b—-, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” the former vice president recounted.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Biden did not accurately portray the timetable of Shokin’s firing, finding the vice president made his demand during a visit to Kyiv in December 2015.
However, the report said, “In the eight days before Shokin was fired in March 2016, Biden phoned Poroshenko four times to reiterate the U.S. position, former aides said. The Ukrainian leader finally relented, and Shokin was sacked.”
President Donald Trump’s mention on his July 25, 2019, phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of Biden’s Council of Foreign Relations boast and his request to look into the matter is what the “whistleblower” and congressional Democrats pointed to as an abuse of power by Trump leading to his impeachment.
The original media reports were that Trump made a quid pro quo demand of Zelensky: Investigate Joe and Hunter Biden or forgo $391 million in U.S. military aid.
Then Trump released the transcript undercutting this narrative.
The president said during his call with Zelensky, “[T]here’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.
“Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it. … It sounds horrible to me.”
No quid pro quo demand was made.
The proof is in the pudding that Ukraine never launched or announced it would launch an investigation into the Bidens and the aid was released in mid-September 2019.
Investigative journalist John Solomon said on Fox News in October that some media outlets wrongly reported that Shokin had closed his investigation into Burisma when Biden called for his ouster.
“Not true,” Solomon told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “I have the prosecutorial file. It was active.”
“I have the emails of the Burisma [legal] team negotiating with the prosecutor the very day that Shokin was fired,” he said.
The reporter added that Shokin offered sworn testimony that he was told he was fired because Joe Biden was not happy the prosecutor had not dropped the Burisma case.
In a piece for The Hill, Solomon wrote, “In a newly sworn affidavit prepared for a European court, Shokin testified that when he was fired in March 2016, he was told the reason was that Biden was unhappy about the Burisma investigation.”
“The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,” Shokin testified.
Democrat lawmakers are quick to believe almost any conspiracy floated about Trump, and they even tried to remove him from office for one.
How about, for a change of pace, investigating a matter that actually has the appearance of wrongdoing on its face by someone who is now seeking the highest office in the land?
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