knapplc
Active member
What happened between Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and the Ukraine?
Rolling Stone
Business Insider
The Intercept
Rolling Stone
What Actually Happened Between Joe Biden and Ukraine, Explained
Now, this may be difficult to believe, but what actually happened between Biden and Ukraine is far more complicated than the president claims. In fact, it isn’t really that much of a controversy at all. Here’s a brief rundown of what inspired Trump’s latest efforts to get a foreign government to investigate one of his chief political opponents.
From February 2015 to March 2016, Viktor Shokin was prosecutor general of Ukraine. His ouster was the result of pressure from a large consensus of Western nations, including the United States, that were concerned Shokin was at the center of a lot of the country’s corruption. Their concern peaked when, in February 2016, Shokin’s own deputy prosecutor, Vitaly Kasko, resigned, citing the corruption and cronyism within the office. “The General Prosecutor’s Office has become a dead institution, which nobody believes is independent,” Kasko said at the time.
Biden was one of the leaders of the effort to remove Shokin, and a month after Kasko’s resignation, he threatened to withhold American loan guarantees from Ukraine so long as Shokin was heading the prosecutor’s office. Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, also threatened to withdraw financial support for Ukraine unless it cleaned up its corruption problem. Pretty much everyone recognized Shokin had to go, and a month later Ukrainian Parliament voted to remove him from office.
Nothing to see here, right? Not quite, according to the Trump administration. While Shokin was still in power, his office investigated a Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma Holdings. Biden’s son, Hunter, was on the company’s board, a role for which he received payments of up to $50,000 per month. But according to CNN, at least one official in the prosecutor’s office said the investigation had been suspended by the time Biden threatened to withhold financial aid until Shokin was removed. The former vice president also did not appear to do anything to thwart other efforts, including those of the Obama administration, to investigate Burisma.
There also doesn’t seem to have been much legitimacy to Shokin’s investigation in the first place. According to tweets from Russia’s Crony Capitalism author and Ukraine expert Anders Åslund, the inquiry was likely nothing more than an effort to extort Mykola Zlochevsky, the company’s owner. “A prosecutor in Ukraine is usually a person who uses state power to investigate crimes, but after having done so the prosecutor goes to the culprit & extorts him or her, after which the prosecutor closes the case,” he wrote before noting that Shokin’s case against Burisma was quickly closed.
The same may have been true of Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who also investigated Burisma before closing the case 10 months later. “Lutsenko did not prosecute any serious criminal during his 3 years in office,” explained Åslund.
Business Insider
Here's the truth about the allegations involving Joe Biden's son and Ukraine drummed up by Trump and Rudy Giuliani
Hunter Biden worked for the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm that consulted for Burisma. Biden was in charge for the company's legal affairs with international companies, according to a press release, but Biden has disputed that characterization. At the time, Burisma's founder faced multiple investigations into alleged tax evasion and money laundering.
Hunter Biden later stepped down from the board in April 2019 when his term expired.
Joe Biden was part of a larger push coming from former President Barack Obama's administration for the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin to be removed over concerns of corruption in his office. Biden acted as a vocal opponent of Shokin and has publicly detailed his threat to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees from the country if Shokin wasn't fired.
But reports have since emerged showing there was not an active investigation into Hunter when the former vice president made the push for Shokin's firing. Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine's prosecutor general, later said that he had no evidence of wrongdoing against either Biden.
Despite the absence of proven wrongdoing by the Bidens, the Trump administration has used the back-and-forth to obscure Giuliani's communications with Ukraine and growing concerns that Trump may have collaborated with a foreign power to gain political leverage.
After the report, Giuliani announced he was planning to travel to Ukraine to press president-elect Volodymyr Zelensky to pursue two investigations that could act as political leverage for Trump.
Giuliani eventually canceled his trip after facing widespread criticism for what appeared to be an attempt to push a foreign government to meddle in the 2020 US election, but Trump and his allies have continued claiming Biden was acting in his own personal interest.
The Intercept
Discuss!A Republican Conspiracy Theory About a Biden-in-Ukraine Scandal Has Gone Mainstream. But It Is Not True.
Viral rumors that Joe Biden abused his power as vice president to protect his son’s business interests in Ukraine in 2016, which spread last week from the pro-Trump media ecosystem to the New York Times, are “absolute nonsense,” according to Ukraine’s leading anti-corruption activist. That evaluation is backed by foreign correspondents in Kiev and a former official with knowledge of Biden’s outreach to Ukraine after President Viktor Yanukovych was deposed in a popular uprising in 2014.
In an interview with The Intercept, Daria Kaleniuk, an American-educated lawyer who founded Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, expressed frustration that two recent front-page stories in the New York Times, on how the conspiracy theory is being used to attack Biden, failed to properly debunk the false accusation. According to Kaleniuk, and a former anti-corruption prosecutor, there is simply no truth to the rumor now spreading like wildfire across the internet.
The accusation is that Biden blackmailed Ukraine’s new leaders into firing the country’s chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to derail an investigation he was leading into a Ukrainian gas company that the vice president’s son, Hunter, was paid to advise.
The truth, Kaleniuk said, is that Shokin was forced from office at Biden’s urging because he had failed to conduct thorough investigations of corruption, and had stifled efforts to investigate embezzlement and misconduct by public officials following the 2014 uprising.
Properly debunking this particular conspiracy theory is easier said than done, though, since it is set in Ukraine, a country with byzantine political intrigue at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. The rivalries between political factions in Kiev are so intense that even the country’s new anti-corruption agencies are at each other’s throats.
There is no question that Biden did, during a visit to Kiev in late 2015, threaten to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless Shokin was dismissed. But the vice president, who was leading the Obama administration’s effort to fight corruption in Ukraine, did the country a favor by hastening Shokin’s departure, Kaleniuk said, since he had failed to properly investigate corrupt officials.
Last edited by a moderator:
