What Actually Happened Between Joe Biden and Ukraine, Explained

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Hint: It’s not what President Trump wants the media to believe

President Trump has all but admitted he asked the Ukrainian government to investigate a political opponent, and there’s plenty of reason to believe he threatened to withhold Congress-approved aid if the country were to refuse to comply.

For Trump and his allies, however, the real scandal is not Trump’s actions in the Ukraine. The real problem here is about Joe Biden.

Specifically, the president and his surrogates are pressing the media to investigate Biden’s connection to the ouster of a prosecutor there. “Sleepy Joe Biden … forced a tough prosecutor out from investigating his son’s company by threat of not giving big dollars to Ukraine,” Trump tweeted Sunday night. “That’s the real story!”

Now, this may be difficult to believe, but what actually happened between Biden and Ukraine is far more complicated than the president claims. In fact, it isn’t really that much of a controversy at all. Here’s a brief rundown of what inspired Trump’s latest efforts to get a foreign government to investigate one of his chief political opponents.

From February 2015 to March 2016, Viktor Shokin was prosecutor general of Ukraine. His ouster was the result of pressure from a large consensus of Western nations, including the United States, that were concerned Shokin was at the center of a lot of the country’s corruption. Their concern peaked when, in February 2016, Shokin’s own deputy prosecutor, Vitaly Kasko, resigned, citing the corruption and cronyism within the office. “The General Prosecutor’s Office has become a dead institution, which nobody believes is independent,” Kasko said at the time.

Biden was one of the leaders of the effort to remove Shokin, and a month after Kasko’s resignation, he threatened to withhold American loan guarantees from Ukraine so long as Shokin was heading the prosecutor’s office. Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, also threatened to withdraw financial support for Ukraine unless it cleaned up its corruption problem. Pretty much everyone recognized Shokin had to go, and a month later Ukrainian Parliament voted to remove him from office.

Nothing to see here, right? Not quite, according to the Trump administration. While Shokin was still in power, his office investigated a Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma Holdings. Biden’s son, Hunter, was on the company’s board, a role for which he received payments of up to $50,000 per month. But according to CNN, at least one official in the prosecutor’s office said the investigation had been suspended by the time Biden threatened to withhold financial aid until Shokin was removed. The former vice president also did not appear to do anything to thwart other efforts, including those of the Obama administration, to investigate Burisma.

There also doesn’t seem to have been much legitimacy to Shokin’s investigation in the first place. According to tweets from Russia’s Crony Capitalism author and Ukraine expert Anders Åslund, the inquiry was likely nothing more than an effort to extort Mykola Zlochevsky, the company’s owner. “A prosecutor in Ukraine is usually a person who uses state power to investigate crimes, but after having done so the prosecutor goes to the culprit & extorts him or her, after which the prosecutor closes the case,” he wrote before noting that Shokin’s case against Burisma was quickly closed.

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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/biden-ukraine-prosecutor-trump-tweet-888662/

[Gothmog]

1. The press has investigated trump's claims and found these claims to be bogus

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[Gothmog]

2. Trump appears to be trying to do is to turn his own impeachment into a big deflection

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[Gothmog]

3. Great Statement by Joe Biden

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[onetexan]

4. the Dumpster is trying to do to Biden with the Ukraine story what he did to Hillary with her email &

Benghazi situations. Only this time he got caught.

[Gothmog]

5. Former Ukraine prosecutor says Hunter Biden "did not violate anything"

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A former top Ukrainian prosecutor, whose allegations were at the heart of the dirt-digging effort by Rudolph W. Giuliani, said Thursday he believed that Hunter Biden did not run afoul of any laws in Ukraine.

“From the perspective of Ukrainian legislation, he did not violate anything,” former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko told The Washington Post in his first interview since the disclosure of a whistleblower complaint alleging pressure by President Trump on Ukraine’s president, Volodymr Zelensky.

Lutsenko’s comments about Hunter Biden — which echo what he told Bloomberg News in May — were significant, because Trump and his personal attorney Giuliani have sought to stir up suspicions about both Hunter and former vice president Joe Biden’s conduct in Ukraine in recent weeks. Joe Biden is leading Trump in many opinion polls ahead of the 2020 election.

Hunter Biden has denied any wrongdoing, and there is no evidence he was involved in any lawbreaking in his work in Ukraine with the country’s largest private gas company.