DU, Let's gather the facts and establish a timeline for the entire Ukraine story.
It’s what we did in the past and we would have a ready, accurate reference for our upcoming battles.
There WILL be battles.
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/09/trump-twists-facts-on-biden-and-ukraine/
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In March 2016, Biden visited Ukraine and warned that the U.S. would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees if Ukraine failed to deal with corruption and remove Shokin as its prosecutor general. Biden disclosed this demand during a January 2018 event at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Biden recalled. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
But the U.S. was not alone in pressuring Ukraine to fire Shokin.
A month earlier, International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde threatened to withhold $40 billion unless Ukraine undertook “a substantial new effort” to fight corruption after the country’s economic minister and his team resigned to protest government corruption. That same month, a “reform-minded deputy prosecutor resigned, complaining that his efforts to address government corruption had been consistently stymied by his own prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin,” according to a Jan. 3, 2017, Congressional Research Services report.
Shokin served as prosecutor general under Viktor Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine who fled to Russia after he was removed from power in 2014 and was later found guilty of treason. Shokin remained in power after Yanukovych’s ouster, but he failed “to indict any major figures from the Yanukovych administration for corruption,” according to testimony John E. Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under President George W. Bush, gave in March 2016 to a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“By late fall of 2015, the EU and the United States joined the chorus of those seeking Mr. Shokin’s removal as the start of an overall reform of the Procurator General’s Office,” Herbst testified. “U.S. Vice President Joe Biden spoke publicly about this before and during his December visit to Kyiv; but Mr. Shokin remained in place.”
In early 2016, Deputy General Prosecutor Vitaliy Kasko resigned in protest of corruption within Shokin’s office. In a televised statement, Kasko said: “Today, the General Prosecutor’s office is a brake on the reform of criminal justice, a hotbed of corruption, an instrument of political pressure, one of the key obstacles to the arrival of foreign investment in Ukraine.”
In reporting on Kasko’s resignation, Reuters noted that Ukraine’s “failure to tackle endemic corruption” threatened the IMF’s $40 billion aid program for Ukraine. At the time, the IMF put a hold on $1.7 billion in aid that had been due to be released to Ukraine four months earlier.
“After President Poroshenko complained that Shokin was taking too long to clean up corruption even within the PGO itself, he asked for Shokin’s resignation,” the CRS report said. Shokin resigned in March 2016, coinciding with Biden’s visit to Ukraine and a series of events that increased pressure on Shokin.
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Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke with the foreign leader earlier this month during a visit to Ukraine. He told The Post that Zelensky "directly" expressed concerns at their meeting that "the aid that was being cut off to Ukraine by the president was a consequence of his unwillingness to launch an investigation into the Bidens."
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http://www.salon.com/2019/09/24/trump-confirms-he-withheld-military-aid-from-ukraine-before-call-with-nations-leader/
That was weeks ago. Did Zelensky just imagine a connection between the aid being cut off and investigating the Bidens? Did he broach the subject with Sen. Murphy, maybe to sound the alarm? Would he bother to say anything about it if he wasn't pretty sure he was being pressured?
