No, that is flat out not true. That is just a desperate right wing line.
Fact - Joe Biden was representing the Obama administration view and it was a bipartisan view at the time. It also was the view of the IMF and EU and more. Joe threaten to withhold money to Ukraine if they did not fire a prosecutor who was slow-walking investigations, and was not really investigating Burisma. Hunter was hired to do a job.
But I understand some are stuck in the right wing line for all this.
Within months, though, the State Department began suspecting that the office of Mr. Poroshenko’s first prosecutor general was accepting bribes to protect Mykola Zlochevsky, the oligarch owner of Burisma Holdings, the gas company where Hunter Biden was a board member. In a February 2015 meeting in Kiev with a deputy prosecutor, a
State Department official named George P. Kent demanded to know “who took the bribe and how much was it?”
The prosecutor general was fired soon after. But it wasn’t long before the new prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was drawing allegations of corruption, including from State Department officials who suspected he was shaking down targets and intentionally slow-walking investigations to protect allies.
Mr. Giuliani has claimed, without evidence, that Mr. Biden’s push to oust Mr. Shokin was an attempt to block scrutiny of his son’s actions. In fact, Mr. Biden was just one of many officials calling for Mr. Shokin to go. Good-government activists were protesting his actions in the streets, as were eurozone power players like Christine Lagarde, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, along with Ms. Nuland and
Senate Republicans.
“The position regarding getting rid of Shokin was not Vice President Biden’s position; it was the position of the U.S. government, as well as the European Union and international financial institutions,” said Amos J. Hochstein, former coordinator for international energy affairs at the State Department and one of the few administration officials who directly confronted Mr. Biden at the time about his son.......
By late 2015, American officials had grown so frustrated with Mr. Poroshenko’s sluggish response on all fronts that Mr. Biden was dispatched to make the case publicly for reforms to the Ukrainian Parliament.
That December, in a speech that he later described as one of the most important he had ever delivered, the vice president told legislators they had
“to remove all conflicts between their business interest and their government responsibilities.” He also singled out the natural gas industry, saying, “The energy sector needs to be competitive, ruled by market principles — not sweetheart deals.”....
Mr. Shokin was eventually fired, but only months later, after I.M.F. officials threatened to withdraw funding.....
Bob Bauer, former Obama White House counsel and Biden adviser, said that even pressuring Hunter Biden to quit the board would have constituted a breach of that firewall, and suggested that was one of the reasons the vice president chose not to do it. “The independent activities of an adult child simply don’t create a ‘conflict of interest’ for the parent who is a public official,” he said. “And as a matter of sound ethical practice, it is important for officials in this position to maintain that distance: to be able to show that, in doing their jobs, they could not have been affected by discussions or involvement with their adult children relating to private business matters. Their posture has to be, ‘Whatever you decide to do, I am going to do what I have to do.’”
Mr. Biden has said he first learned of his son’s activities in Ukraine when the story broke in 2014. He told his son, “
I hope you know what you are doing,” according to Hunter Biden’s account of their discussion in The New Yorker earlier this year.
It is a good article. It has a firewall but you can get a certain number of free articles a month.
