This is discredited?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4637475&forum_id=2ค1¤7PHPSESSID=188a95202f833e097d78c96d76bac3f6#41015305)

KIEV (Reuters) - During his time on the board of one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Hunter Biden, the son of former U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden, was regarded as a helpful non-executive director with a powerful name, according to people familiar with Biden’s role at the company.

Biden’s role at Burisma Holdings Ltd has come under intense scrutiny following unsupported accusations by U.S. President Donald Trump that Joe Biden improperly tried to help his son’s business interests in Ukraine.

Interviews with more than a dozen people, including executives and former prosecutors in Ukraine, paint a picture of a director who provided advice on legal issues, corporate finance and strategy during a five-year term on the board, which ended in April of this year.

Biden never visited Ukraine for company business during that time, according to three of the people.

They also said that his presence on the board didn’t protect the company from its most serious challenge: a series of criminal investigations launched by Ukrainian authorities against its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, a multimillionaire former minister of ecology and natural resources. The allegations concern tax violations, money-laundering and licences given to Burisma during the period where Zlochevsky was a minister.

Revelations in a whistleblower complaint that Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, pressed the Ukrainians to pursue investigations into Burisma and the role of Hunter Biden have sparked an impeachment inquiry by Democrats in the House of Representatives. Trump faces allegations that he withheld U.S. military assistance for Ukraine to place pressure on Kiev to investigate his potential Democratic rival in next year’s U.S. presidential election.

Giuliani has alleged, without providing evidence, that Joe Biden pushed for the firing of Ukraine's top prosecutor to end an investigation into Burisma and Zlochevsky in order to protect his son.

Hunter Biden, 49 years old, has denied wrongdoing. In a public statement on Oct 13, his lawyer George Mesires said: “Despite extensive scrutiny, at no time has any law enforcement agency, either domestic or foreign, alleged that Hunter engaged in wrongdoing at any point during his five-year term.”

In an interview with ABC News aired Tuesday, Hunter Biden said in retrospect it may have been poor judgment to join Burisma’s board while his father was vice president, but added: “Did I make a mistake based upon some ethical lapse? Absolutely not.”

Biden, in the interview added that he didn’t discuss his business dealings in Ukraine with his father, other than one brief exchange in which his father told him “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

A lawyer for Hunter Biden didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Joe Biden has also denied any wrongdoing, saying he called for the removal of then-chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin in 2016 because of his ineffectiveness in tackling corruption in Ukraine, a widespread problem that both the United States and the European Union had long highlighted.

A spokesman for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, Andrew Bates, said: "Donald Trump is so terrified of running against Joe Biden that he sent his presidency into a tailspin by trying to blackmail Ukraine into intervening in our elections with universally-debunked lies.”

Burisma and Zlochevsky didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In an interview with Reuters in September, former Ukraine prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko said Hunter Biden’s position on the board when his father was vice-president raised no red flags. “From the point of view of Ukrainian law, (Hunter Biden) didn’t violate anything,” Lutsenko said.

Ukraine’s new general prosecutor Ruslan Ryaboshapka, who took over in August, said he was not aware of any wrongdoing by Hunter Biden. His office announced on Oct 4 that it was reviewing 15 previous investigations related to Zlochevsky but no decision had been taken on how to proceed against him or people related to him.

The White House declined to comment.

“CEREMONIAL FIGURE”

Zlochevsky, who founded Burisma in 2002, served as a minister under Ukraine’s then-President Viktor Yanukovich from 2010 to 2012. Burisma then began adding high-profile names to its board, including Biden and a business associate of his called Devon Archer, in April 2014.

The company has said it had wanted to strengthen corporate governance. According to two sources close to the company, Burisma was also looking to attract international investment as well as expand overseas.

Oleksandr Onyshchenko, a businessman and former member of the Ukrainian parliament who knows the Burisma founder, said it had been Zlochevsky’s idea to appoint Biden as a director. “It was to protect (the company)” at a time when it was facing investigations, said Onyshchenko, who left the country in 2016. In the run up to Biden’s appointment, a popular uprising led to the removal of the Russian-backed Yanukovich in February 2014.

Biden, a trained lawyer, had served on the board of a U.S. company and had also formed an investment firm with fellow Yale graduates Archer and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of former U.S. Senator John Kerry.

According to four sources close to the company, Biden regularly attended Burisma’s twice annual board meetings – all of which were held outside of Ukraine.

A source close to the company said Biden took part in strategic conversations and shared his opinions and experience. In between board meetings, “there were constant calls, dialogue, sharing of advice, consideration of different options,” the source said. “Expansion to other markets was also discussed,” the source added.

Another source close to Burisma said Biden assisted with analysis of oil and gas assets the company was considering buying abroad, though a deal didn’t go through. The company was considering possible acquisitions in Europe, Kazakhstan and the United States, the source and another person close to Burisma said.

Both sources said that around the time Biden was appointed, Burisma was also looking to secure a financing deal with foreign investment funds, including one in the United States.

Biden helped to find lawyers to work on this process, before it broke down due to the start of the war in east Ukraine, one of those two sources said. “He was a ceremonial figure,” that person added.

BURISMA PAYMENTS

How much Biden earned at Burisma has also become a central issue. Trump has portrayed Hunter Biden as having earned vast sums of money while at Burisma, which the president has suggested was an indication of potential wrongdoing.

In an October 6 post on his usual Twitter account, Trump said Hunter Biden “was handed $100,000 a month (Plus, Plus) from a Ukrainian based company, even though he had no experience in energy.” He added, in the Twitter message, that it couldn’t have been legitimate and as president he has “an OBLIGATION to look into possible, or probably CORRUPTION.”

According to payment records reviewed by Reuters that two former Ukrainian law enforcement officials say are Burisma’s, the company paid about $3.4 million to a company that was controlled by Archer called Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC between April 2014 and November 2015.

Specifically, the records show 18 months in which two payments of $83,333 per month were paid to Rosemont Seneca Bohai for “consulting services.” The two sources said that one of those monthly payments was intended for Biden and one for Archer. Reuters was not able to independently verify the authenticity of the documents or how much money Hunter Biden received.

One of the sources said prosecutors obtained the payment records in the course of one of their investigations into Burisma related to activities at the company prior to Archer and Biden's appointments to the board. A Ukrainian lawmaker released copies of the records at a conference for news media last week.

A lawyer for Archer didn’t respond to a request for comment.

INVESTIGATIONS

Lutsenko, who succeeded Shokin as Ukraine’s prosecutor general in 2016, took over a tax investigation into Burisma before closing the case ten months later, after the company had paid a settlement in relation to the tax investigation.

The former prosecutor said that any issues Burisma did have were not related to Biden. In addition to the closed tax investigation, Ukraine authorities opened an investigation into licenses awarded to Burisma and a separate money-laundering probe into founder Zlochevsky. Both of these have been re-opened in recent months, but neither relate to the period after Biden joined the board.

Burisma and Zlochevsky haven’t commented publicly on the re-opened probes.

(Additional reporting by Kateryna Malofieieva and Natalia Zinets in Kiev, Justyna Pawlak in Warsaw, Anton Zverev in Moscow and Steve Holland, Karen Freifeld and Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington, DC; Editing by Cassell Bryan-Low)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4637475&forum_id=2ค1¤7PHPSESSID=188a95202f833e097d78c96d76bac3f6#41015388)

Key takeaways

• Hunter Biden did hold a directorship for a Ukrainian gas company while his father was vice president. Experts agree that Hunter Biden's acceptance of the position created a conflict of interest for his father.

• Vice President Joe Biden did urge Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, with the threat of withholding U.S. aid. But that was the position of the wider U.S. government, as well as other international institutions.

• We found no evidence to support the idea that Joe Biden advocated with his son's interests in mind, as the message suggests. It's not even clear that the company was actively under investigation or that a change in prosecutors benefited it.

What was Hunter Biden’s role?

Hunter Biden did hold a directorship with a natural gas company called Burisma Holdings, beginning in the spring of 2014.

Reuters reported at the time that a statement on the company’s website said the younger Biden "would help the company with "transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion," and other issues. The company also retained the law firm where Biden had been working, Boies Schiller Flexner.

The position with Burisma came at a time when the younger Biden had joined with Christopher Heinz (the stepson of then-Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.) and Devon Archer (a Kerry family friend) in a string of investment and consulting firms. Firms run by Biden and Archer "pursued business with international entities that had a stake in American foreign policy decisions, sometimes in countries where connections implied political influence and protection," the New York Times reported.

Biden’s Burisma directorship attracted attention because Burisma was owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, a minister under Russia-friendly President Viktor F. Yanukovych who subsequently went into exile after a popular revolution. After Yanukovych was ousted, Zlochevsky faced a variety of corruption-related investigations involving his business.

In 2015, Ukraine’s newly appointed prosecutor general Viktor Shokin inherited some of the investigations into Zlochevsky and his company. (Zlochevsky and the company have denied the allegations.) Shokin was ousted as prosecutor in 2016. Shokin is the prosecutor the viral post is talking about (more on that later).

Did Joe Biden know about his son’s Ukrainian ties?

The Biden campaign told PolitiFact that the vice president learned about his son's role on the board through media reports and never discussed anything related to this company with his son.

In a White House press briefing on May 13, 2014, spokesman Jay Carney was asked about it, and whether it presented the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Carney said, "I would refer you to the Vice President’s office. I saw those reports. Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the Vice President or President. But I would refer you to the Vice President’s office."

A year and a half later, the New York Times published an article that suggested that "the credibility of the vice president’s anti-corruption message may have been undermined" by Hunter Biden’s dealings with the company.

In that 2015 article, Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman for the vice president, played down any impact on the elder Biden’s policies.

"Hunter Biden is a private citizen and a lawyer," she said. "The vice president does not endorse any particular company and has no involvement with this company. The vice president has pushed aggressively for years, both publicly with groups like the U.S.-Ukraine Business Forum and privately in meetings with Ukrainian leaders, for Ukraine to make every effort to investigate and prosecute corruption in accordance with the rule of law. It will once again be a key focus during his trip this week."

Hunter Biden told the New York Times this month in a statement that "at no time have I discussed with my father the company’s business, or my board service, including my initial decision to join the board."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4637475&forum_id=2ค1¤7PHPSESSID=188a95202f833e097d78c96d76bac3f6#41015436)

Numerous media outlets have reported that Hunter Biden was paid as much as $50,000 a month for his work with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.

Verdict: Unsubstantiated

No available financial records show Burisma directly paid Hunter Biden. The $50,000-a-month figure stems from payments made to Biden by New York-based capital management firm Rosemont Seneca Bohai. Bank records show Rosemont Seneca Bohai received payments from Burisma, as well as dozens of other entities and individuals. It’s unclear why Rosemont Seneca Bohai was paying Hunter Biden.

Fact Check:

Hunter Biden served on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma while his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, oversaw policy regarding the Eastern European nation.

Hunter Biden, who served on the Burisma board of directors from April 2014 to April 2019, was paid a salary for his work with the company, according to a statement Burisma chairman Alan Apter gave to The Wall Street Journal. In his statement, Apter said Hunter Biden would receive a salary for his independent directorship, but did not specify how much Hunter Biden would be paid.

Numerous media outlets have stated Hunter Biden was paid as much as $50,000 a month for his work with Burisma, but available financial records show no direct payments from the company to him. The frequently cited figure stems from payments Hunter Biden received from Rosemont Seneca Bohai, a New York-based capital management firm owned and controlled by longtime business partner Devon Archer.

Rosemont Seneca Bohai Morgan Stanley bank records show Hunter Biden, while simultaneously serving on Burisma’s board, received $708,302 between June 2014 and October 2015 from Rosemont Seneca Bohai, for undisclosed reasons, in a series of payments that ranged from $10,000 to $150,979 per month. At the same time, Rosemont Seneca Bohai received over $3.15 million from Burisma for “consulting services.” (Rosemont Seneca Bohai was a capital management firm, not a consulting firm.)

Hunter Biden had no official role with Rosemont Seneca Bohai at the time of the payments, according to the company’s business filings.

“Hunter Biden was a Yale-educated lawyer who had served on the boards of Amtrak and a number of nonprofit organizations and think tanks, but lacked any experience in Ukraine and just months earlier had been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine,” wrote New York Times journalist Kenneth Vogel. “He would be paid as much as $50,000 per month in some months for his work for the company, Burisma Holdings.”

Vogel was the first to report Burisma paid Hunter Biden $50,000 per month. It’s unclear how exactly Vogel calculated that figure, but it is possible he used an average of the payments regularly made to Hunter Biden from Rosemont Seneca Bohai over the period of 17 months shown in the available bank records.

However, the Daily Caller News Foundation could not confirm the accuracy of this figure, as there is no evidence the payments from Rosemont Seneca Bohai to Hunter Biden are necessarily for his work with Burisma. (RELATED: ‘Fun Times In Beijing’: Hunter Biden Received $700,000 From Company That Held Stake In Chinese Investment Firm)

During the same time Rosemont Seneca Bohai was receiving payments from Burisma, it also received nearly $27 million in payments from dozens of other entities and individuals. The money Hunter Biden received from Rosemont Seneca Bohai could possibly be for his work with any of these other entities or individuals, or for some other unknown reason.

When ABC News’s Amy Robach asked directly about the alleged $50,000 figure, Hunter Biden said, “Look, I’m a private citizen. One thing that I don’t have to do is sit here and open my kimono as it relates to how much money I made or make or did or didn’t.”

Rosemont Seneca Bohai, Burisma, Kenneth Vogel and Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4637475&forum_id=2ค1¤7PHPSESSID=188a95202f833e097d78c96d76bac3f6#41015485)

But no evidence of corruption has ever been found⁠—here’s what actually happened:

In May 2014, Hunter Biden took a board seat on Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings. He was reportedly paid $50,000 per month.

Burisma had ties to Ukraine’s previous president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted from office.

As vice president, Joe Biden was tasked with reducing corruption in Ukraine after Yanukovych⁠—eventually charged with “mass killing of civilians”⁠— exiled himself to Crimea amid threats of civil war.

The overlap between the vice president and his son raised concerns over a potential conflict of interest. The Obama White House said there was no issue with Hunter Biden’s work, and that no conflict of interest existed.

In 2016, and with the support of other world leaders, Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion of U.S. aid unless Ukraine’s leaders fired the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, for being too soft on corruption⁠⁠—which they did.

Before Shokin was fired, he had been conducting an investigation of Burisma, and Hunter Biden allegedly was a subject. But the investigation had been inactive for over a year by the time Joe Biden pushed for Shokin’s ouster.

Hunter Biden stepped down from his Burisma board seat in April 2019. He had been offered another term but refused because it could possibly hurt Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special envoy for Ukraine, testified in an October 3 hearing before Congress that he warned Giuliani that he was being given “untrustworthy” information about the Bidens. Volker resigned his post September 28 after being named in the whistleblower report.

Ukraine’s current top prosecutor Ruslan Ryaboshapka said October 4 he will review all old cases involving Burisma. He did not say when the review will be completed, or if the cases will be re-opened.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4637475&forum_id=2ค1¤7PHPSESSID=188a95202f833e097d78c96d76bac3f6#41015523)

In what was his first public appearance since he was thrust into the spotlight by Rudy Giuliani’s extracurricular efforts to dig up dirt on political rival Joe Biden, the 49-year-old son of the presidential candidate said his work on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma was above board, but that he regretted the impact it had had on the race. “What I regret is not taking into account that there would be a Rudy Giuliani and a president of the United States that would be listening to this—this ridiculous conspiracy idea,” Biden said. “I gave a hook to some very unethical people to act in illegal ways to try to do some harm to my father… That’s where I made the mistake. So I take full responsibility for that. Did I do anything improper? No, not in any way. Not in any way whatsoever.”

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Biden touched on the charge he wasn’t qualified to be on the board of a gas company. “I was vice chairman of the board of Amtrak for five years,” he said. “I was the chairman of the board of the U.N. World Food Program. I was a lawyer for Boies Schiller Flexner, one of the most prestigious law firms in the world.” “I think that I had as much knowledge as anybody else that was on the board—if not more,” Biden said.

“If your last name wasn’t Biden,” ABC News reporter Amy Robach asked, “do you think you would’ve been asked to be on the board of Burisma?” “I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not, in retrospect,” he said. “But that’s—you know—I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.” “Because my dad was Vice President of the United States, there’s literally nothing, as a young man or as a full grown adult that—my father in some way hasn’t had influence over,” Biden said.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/hunter-biden-interview-ukraine-burisma-board-mistake-retrospect.html

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"It's more about ethics. If the son of a top politician receives some payments from a company for whatever reason, there's always a conflict of interests," says Alexander Paraschiy, the head of research at Concorde Capital, an investment firm in Kyiv.

Hunter Biden was paid about $50,000 a month as a Burisma director, according to The Wall Street Journal.

"It usually is a good investment for any Ukrainian businessman to hire some reputable guy or the relative of a reputable guy. It definitely paid off for Mr. Zlochevsky," says Paraschiy.

Zlochevsky expanded Burisma at the same time when he was Ukraine's environment minister, whose duties included issuing drilling licenses. After the bloody revolution on Kyiv's streets five years ago, Zlochevsky — like disgraced President Viktor Yanukovych — fled Ukraine.

Amid the political turmoil in Kyiv, Russia annexed Crimea and fomented an armed insurgency in eastern Ukraine. But hopes were high that the new Ukrainian government would at least start uprooting endemic corruption.

Burisma faced a money-laundering investigation and questions over how it had obtained some of its licenses to drill for natural gas. In spring 2014, the company appointed Hunter Biden and a former Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, to its board. Three years later, Burisma added Cofer Black, a former CIA official and foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, to the board.

"I believe the only reason Burisma and Zlochevsky were inviting people with such names was to whitewash their reputation and to present themselves as a company doing legitimate business in Ukraine," says Daria Kaleniuk, head of the nongovernmental Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv.

The Zlocci shop features collections of flashy men's shoes made from crocodile and caiman skins arranged on two polished marble tables. In 2015, investigative reporters traced the ownership of the business to Zlochevsky.

Lucian Kim/NPR

As a privately owned company, Burisma is not required to publicize its annual results. In a recent presentation for investors, it says it more than doubled its hydrocarbon production since 2013 and paid more than $240 million in taxes over the previous two years.

In an upbeat 2017 promotional video, Burisma presents itself as an energy company looking to expand beyond Ukraine's borders. Photographs of Hunter Biden and the other four board members appear over the company's "key corporate governance principles: leadership, efficiency, remuneration and transparency."

YouTube

But for a company with global ambitions, Burisma is hardly transparent in dealing with media. Reporters' requests for comment are summarily ignored. Alexander Gorbunenko, the chief financial officer at Burisma when Hunter Biden served on the board, declined to comment to NPR, saying to do so would be "unethical."

Zlochevsky's whereabouts are unknown, and he and his company are invisible in Kyiv. One of the few signs of the elusive energy tycoon is a boutique on the ground floor of an upscale apartment building on the Dnieper River.

The Zlocci shop features collections of flashy men's shoes made from crocodile and caiman skins arranged on two polished marble tables. A pair of low-cut crocodile boots goes for more than $3,700, while blue pony-hair sneakers cost almost $800. An attentive salesman offers a 30% discount and home delivery.

Even though the Zlocci website says the outfitter is Spanish, a journalistic investigation in 2015 traced the ownership to Zlochevsky. A promotional video — in Ukrainian — shows a model wearing Zlocci shoes in the port of Monaco, where Zlochevsky has been hosting an annual international energy conference since 2016.

"One of the reasons that I am proud to be a member of the board at Burisma is that I believe we are trying to figure out the way to create a radical change in the way we look at energy," Hunter Biden says in undated remarks on the conference website.

Zlochevsky's event has featured such speakers as Prince Albert II of Monaco; Romano Prodi, a former Italian prime minister; Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister; and other past and present luminaries from European and U.S. politics.

Zlochevsky also continues to buy favor with his support for the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.

Kurt Volker, who resigned last week as the Trump administration's special representative for Ukraine, is a senior adviser to the Atlantic Council. Volker's role in the administration's communications with Ukraine's new government is now under scrutiny in Congress.

In September 2018, Vadym Pozharskiy, an adviser to Burisma's board, attended Atlantic Council events in New York and met with Volker and former State Department officials, according to the company's website. Pozharskiy did not reply to repeated requests for comment by NPR.

Hunter Biden, for his part, no longer works for Burisma.

He left the company earlier this year as his father was launching his presidential campaign.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4637475&forum_id=2ค1¤7PHPSESSID=188a95202f833e097d78c96d76bac3f6#41015597)

KIEV, Ukraine—Joe Biden’s involvement with Ukraine and his son’s work in the country, which President Trump has repeatedly said should be investigated, began when the former vice president was serving as the Obama administration’s point man on relations with Ukraine and rooting out bureaucratic corruption.

Soon after Moscow invaded the country in 2014 and annexed its peninsula of Crimea, Mr. Biden took a lead role in U.S. efforts to support the fragile government in Kiev. He shuttled back and forth to the Ukrainian capital, coordinating U.S. aid packages and cajoling the officials to enact reforms even as the country fought off Russian-backed rebels in the country’s east.

Mr. Biden’s son Hunter took a board position with a Ukrainian natural gas extraction company, Burisma Holdings Ltd., in May 2014, months after the vice president took on his role in the country, which some anticorruption advocates feared would undermine the elder Mr. Biden’s work. According to one official with ties to the company, Hunter Biden’s compensation was around $50,000 a month. His position at the company expired in April 2019.

The White House said at the time there was nothing wrong with Hunter Biden’s work, and that it didn’t create a conflict of interest since he was a private person.

“I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Joe Biden told reporters on Saturday.

President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden, according to people familiar with the matter, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani on a probe.

Messrs. Trump and Giuliani have suggested that Joe Biden pushed for the firing of Ukraine’s general prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in March 2016 to stop an investigation into Burisma. In Ukraine, government officials and anticorruption advocates say that is a misrepresentation. Neither Mr. Biden nor his son have been accused of any wrongdoing.

Mr. Biden had called for the ouster of Mr. Shokin because he and others thought that the prosecutor wasn’t aggressive enough.

The owner of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, has been under the scrutiny of prosecutors. A minister of natural resources until 2012, Mr. Zlochevsky was accused of improperly granting gas extraction licenses to firms affiliated with him, and at times was investigated for alleged abuse of power, illegal enrichment and money laundering. Mr. Zlochevsky was never convicted of any crimes and denied any wrongdoing. His lawyer also denied that Mr. Zlochevsky ever benefited from his position in government.

Mr. Shokin had dragged his feet on those investigations, Western diplomats said, and effectively squashed one in London by failing to cooperate with U.K. authorities, who had frozen $23.5 million of Mr. Zlochevsky’s assets. In a speech in 2015, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, called the Ukrainian prosecutor “an obstacle” to anticorruption efforts, and mentioned the U.K. case, which he said led to the escape of illicit assets.

But Ukraine’s government was slow to fire Mr. Shokin, despite warnings from the International Monetary Fund and others that Western aid to the country would be cut off if it didn’t act. Mr. Biden, in one of his trips to Ukraine in 2016, pressured the government, telling them the U.S. would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees. At an event at the Council on Foreign Relations two years later, Mr. Biden said he told Ukraine officials: “If the prosecutor is not fired you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

Mr. Shokin denied any misconduct, and said he was fired illegally. In an interview with a Ukrainian news service, he blamed his dismissal on Ukrainian “grant-eaters”—nonprofit groups seeking to curry favor with the West.

Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., said that Mr. Biden was making the same demands that other lenders to the Ukrainian government were making.

“Everyone in the Western community wanted Shokin sacked,” he said. “The whole G-7, the IMF, the EBRD, everybody was united that Shokin must go, and the spokesman for this was Joe Biden.”

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You just have to sort thru lots of BS to really find the truth, you know?

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Trump should invite Biden to re-'discredit' this antisemitic canard in real-time, for the benefit of those of us who missed the first discreditation. explain, sir.

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