Shokin is lying. The story is a lie still.
Three important questions answered about the Biden “bribe” controversy.
newrepublic.com
It’s Not Joe Biden Who Corrupted Ukraine. It’s Donald Trump...
Let’s go over some old facts one more time. Clip this out, magnet it up to your fridge, keep it there for Thanksgiving, make Uncle Roy read it. We’ll do this in quasi-catechism form, with three questions.....
Question 1. Why did Joe Biden fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin?
Real-Earth known facts: Biden was sent to Kyiv to order that Shokin be fired for his failure to launch aggressive corruption investigations—including into Burisma.
....But Shokin too proved lax in pursuing such cases. Ukraine was a pretty corrupt place, and apparently no one would take on the oligarchs. This hardened group included Mykola Zlochevsky, the head of Burisma. According to
this report, Ukrainian anti-corruption crusaders were pushing for Shokin to probe Zlochevsky and Burisma; the British government had requested information from Shokin’s office as part of an investigation into alleged money-laundering by Zlochevsky. Shokin, according to anti-corruption activists, ignored the U.K. request and dragged his feet generally......
In other words: Burisma (and Zlochevsky) was one of several fronts on which Shokin was failing to act. Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Kyiv-based Anti-Corruption Action Center, was quoted as saying: “Ironically, Joe Biden asked Shokin to leave because the prosecutor failed [to pursue] the Burisma investigation, not because Shokin was tough and active with this case.”
Furthermore, it was this failure to act, not solely on Burisma but more broadly, that convinced the Obama administration, the EU, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund that Shokin had to go. Biden demanded Shokin’s firing on a trip to Kyiv in December 2015. Two months later, IMF head Christine Lagarde threatened to withhold $40 billion in aid unless Ukraine took strong steps to fight corruption. Shokin was finally fired the next month.
Question 2. Aren’t there still a lot of unanswered questions about Biden’s role?
Real-Earth known facts: It has been investigated. By Republicans. Twice! They turned up nothing.
One investigation was undertaken by
Scott Brady, the U.S. attorney for western Pennsylvania, appointed by Trump. When the FBI first got wind of the bribery allegations in 2020, Attorney General Bill Barr appointed Brady to poke around. He interviewed Rudy Giuliani, who was busy spreading these rumors, for several hours once. But whatever Brady did or didn’t do did not end up amounting to much. He closed up his investigation without so much as issuing a report.
The other investigation was conducted by Senate Republicans. It was a joint production of the Senate Finance and Homeland Security committees, chaired, respectively, by
Grassley and Ron Johnson. The report
found nothing. Oh, they padded it out to 87 pages with a lot of tissuey suggestions about possible appearances of conflict and such, but they found no evidence of anything involving Joe Biden.......Oh, yeah—this report was released in September 2020. Right before the election. If they’d found something politically useful, don’t you think we’d have heard about it nonstop in the closing weeks of the election? But we didn’t, because they didn’t.
Question 3. I seem to recall that Trump got impeached over Ukraine. Does all this have anything to do with that?
Real-Earth known facts: Yes! It’s directly tied, because Trump wanted Ukraine to drum up some phony allegations about Biden. So it is Trump and only Trump who tried to corruptly influence Ukraine......Before America got to know Volodymyr Zelenskiy as the courageous Putin resister, they knew him as the guy on the other end of the phone line in July 2019, whom Trump tried to blackmail to find dirt on Biden. He was indirect about it; he spoke the way a mob boss speaks, as he always does, you know, Nice little country ya got dere, be a shame if anything should happen to it.
