Is This the Smoking Gun Proving That Biden Pressured Ukraine to Protect Himself?
We all know that Joe Biden publicly bragged about how in 2016 he pressured then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin by using a $1 billion loan from the Obama Administration as leverage. But according to new evidence, Biden did exactly the opposite of what Department of Justice officials wanted.
According to DOJ, Ukraine had made sufficient progress in implementing anti-corruption reforms and deserved the loan. From Just The News:
“Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee,” said an Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizing the recommendation of the Interagency Policy Committee (IPC), a task force created to advise the Obama White House on whether Ukraine was cleaning up its endemic corruption and deserved more Western foreign aid.
The recommendation is one of several U.S. government memos gathered by Just the News over the last 36 months from Freedom of Information Act litigation, congressional inquiries, and government agency sources that directly conflict with the long-held narrative that Joe Biden was conducting official U.S. policy when he threatened to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee to force Ukraine to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, the country’s equivalent of the American attorney general.
When Joe Biden made the threat to withhold the $1 billion, Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, the energy company Hunter Biden served on the board of making $1 million a year and that had paid both Bidens $5 million each in a bribe to make the investigation go away.
Biden publicly bragged about his actions at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018.
“They were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, … we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, ‘You have no authority. You’re not the president—the president said,’” Biden recalled during a speech. “I said, ‘Call him.’ I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars.’ I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. … 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****. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
Related: The Biden-Burisma Bribe Evidence Is Damning. Here’s Why.
According to memos obtained by Just The News, Obama administration officials in the State Department had invited Shokin and his staff to Washington for a strategy session and had indicated they were “impressed” with his work. However, it was actually emissaries for Burisma who were pressuring U.S. officials to make corruption allegations against their company go away over concerns about potential bribery payments made to get Shokin off their back. The memos also show that a top U.S. official in Kyiv actually blamed Hunter Biden for undercutting U.S. anti-corruption policy in Ukraine because of what he was doing at Burisma.
It’s very clear from the memos that when Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian officials to fire Shokin, he wasn’t acting on behalf of the administration, he was doing so to protect himself and his son Hunter, who allegedly were bribed five million each to protect Burisma.
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