Why Was Ukraine's Top Prosecutor Fired? The Issue At The Heart Of The Dispute Gripping Washington

[rpannier]

snip

Trump and his allies, including his personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, accuse Biden of using his position as vice president and point man on relations with Kyiv in 2016 to help Burisma -- a Ukrainian energy company that was paying Biden's son Hunter, who was on its board of directors -- avoid damage from a criminal investigation.

They assert that Shokin was overseeing an active criminal investigation into Burisma and that Biden at the time told Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that the United States would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless Shokin was fired.

But Ukrainian prosecutors and anti-corruption activists with knowledge of the matter argue that the timeline of developments in the Burisma case and Shokin's stint as chief prosecutor simply does not fit the narrative being put forward by Trump and his allies.

snip

"There was no pressure from anyone from the United States" to close the case against Zlochevskiy, Vitaliy Kasko, who was a deputy prosecutor-general under Shokin and is now first deputy prosecutor-general, told Bloomberg News in May. "It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015," he added.

Activists say the case had been sabotaged by Shokin himself. As an example, they say two months before Hunter Biden joined Burisma's board, British authorities had requested information from Shokin's office as part of an investigation into alleged money laundering by Zlochevskiy. Shokin ignored them.

link
https://www.rferl.org/a/why-was-ukraine-top-prosecutor-fired-viktor-shokin/30181445.html

It's a good read on the timeline of what happened in Ukraine, the players involved and the why's

[DURHAM D]

1. The really weird part of this story is that Trump and

his co-conspirators seem to believe the conspiracy theories they themselves developed. Seems like they all belong in a mental institution.

[Igel]

2. But that leaves unanswered a couple of questions then.

I prefer the traditional narrative: Most wanted Shokin canned, Hunter Biden called for his canning in basically the same way as others. Otherwise, it starts to look suspicious.