Newly released documents from the U.S. State Department show that Ukraine was properly handling corruption allegations when then-Vice President Joe Biden threatened to cut off $1 billion in U.S. aid because, he falsely alleged, it wasn’t handling corruption.
Reported by Just The News, the memoranda belie Biden’s claim that his action had nothing to do with son Hunter’s lucrative job with Burisma Holdings, which Ukraine’s top prosecutor was investigating for corruption.
The Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scheme, which now includes credible allegations of outright bribery, is the center of an investigation by the GOP-controlled U.S. House Committee on Oversight.
The Memoranda
The nut of the influence-peddling claim is that Biden, President Obama’s man on Ukraine, urged Ukraine to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin because he was investigating Burisma Holdings and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. The probe concerned the senior Biden because First Son Hunter was on Burisma’s board of directors. He collected beaucoodles of bucks for doing nothing.
Though Biden claimed that Shokin had to be fired because he was “corrupt,” in June 2015, then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland wrote to Shokin with compliments about his anti-corruption program.
“We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government,” the she wrote. “The United States fully supports your government’s efforts.”
In October 2015, the State Department said likewise: “Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee.”
Indeed, those documents appear to confirm that Shokin was doing his job; i.e., investigating corruption. Problem was, Shokin’s target, Zlochevsky, was tight as a tick with Hunter Biden, to whom the company paid a small fortune for his last name.
So in March 2016, Biden Senior went to Ukraine to issue an ultimatum. Either fire Shokin, or Ukraine won’t receive $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees.
As Biden bragged during an event sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, “I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours.”
Continued Biden:
I looked at them and said, “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.” Well, son of a b**ch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
Other memoranda reveal that “senior State Department officials sent a conflicting message to Shokin before he was fired, inviting his staff to Washington for a January 2016 strategy session and sent him a personal note saying they were ‘impressed’ with his office’s work,” Just The News reported.
As well:
• U.S. officials faced pressure from Burisma emissaries in the United States to make the corruption allegations go away and feared the energy firm had made two bribery payments in Ukraine as part of an effort to get cases settled.
• A top U.S. official in Kyiv blamed Hunter Biden for undercutting U.S. anticorruption policy in Ukraine through his dealings with Burisma.
As The New American reported in 2019, State Department official George Kent tried to warn Biden’s office about the impropriety of his son’s seat on Burisma’s board. But Sleepy Joe didn’t have the “bandwidth” to deal with the problem because his other son, Beau, was dying of cancer.
Kent said the Obama administration orchestrated Shokin’s removal. And he “raised concerns in early 2015 about then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son serving on the board of a Ukrainian energy company but was turned away by a Biden staffer,” the Washington Post reported.
He also “worried that Hunter Biden’s position at the firm Burisma Holdings would complicate efforts by U.S. diplomats to convey to Ukrainian officials the importance of avoiding conflicts of interest.”
Those worries showed up in a confidential email in November 2016, reported Just The News.
Wrote Kent:
The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter’s presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine b/c Ukrainians heard one message from us and then saw another set of behavior with the family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules.
Bribery Allegations
The documents Just The News pried out of the government are just the latest to undermine Joe Biden’s claim that he did nothing wrong when he urged Ukraine to fire Shokin, who was preparing to interview Hunter.
Another is Zlochevsky’s admission to a confidential human source that he paid the Bidens $10 million to shut down the Burisma probe.
Recently-released FBI documents say that “Zlochevsky stated he has two ‘documents (which CHS understood to be wire transfer statements, bank records, etc.), that evidence some payment(s) to the Bidens were made, presumably in exchange for Shokin’s firing.”
If true, then Vice President Biden accepted a bribe in exchange for pushing Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating a company that employed Biden’s son.
No wonder State Department officials worried about it.
H/T: Ace of Spades
