rigorousintuition.ca

Mr Trump has alleged, without evidence, that Mr Biden pressed for the sacking of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect a business that employed his son.

Not Just Ukraine: Rudy and Bannon Try a Whole New Way to Slime Biden
The president and his allies, from Peter Schweizer to Frank Gaffney, want to open a new front on the former VP’s son, even as their Ukraine gambit appears to have backfired.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/rudy-giul ... -china-too

Team Trump’s 2020 strategy is Clinton Cash all over again
https://www.mediamatters.org/rudy-giuli ... over-again

Trump’s Big Lie About Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and Ukraine Falls Apart
In pushing to oust the former prosecutor, Biden did the right thing, no matter the personal cost.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-bi ... alls-apart

It’s ‘Clinton Cash’ all over again as the media blow the Trump whistleblower story
Joshua Holland / Raw StorySeptember 21, 2019
https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/its-cl ... wer-story/

As vice president, Joe Biden was tasked with reducing corruption in Ukraine

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.

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.

Elvis wrote:SLaD, please respect the OP's wishes and don't post further in this thread, which, if I may summarize it, is about the media's reportage on the Bidens' activities in Ukraine. Thanks.

Despite having previously closed the case against Burisma, Lutsenko decided to reopen it this year for reasons that are unclear. It might have had something to do, however, with Rudy Giuliani inviting Lutsenko to New York last year and ultimately meeting with him in January. Nevertheless, nothing came of the second effort to go after Burisma, and Lutsenko is no longer in office after new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky requested his removal.

WASHINGTON — Former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko said Friday that he was not aware of “any possible violation of Ukrainian law by (Joe) Biden and by (Hunter Biden).”

September 28, 2019
On The Motives Behind Whistleblower-gate

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/09/o ... -gate.html

Until very recently the intelligence community complaint form required that any claimant had first hand knowledge of the complaint issue. The form was changed in August (more here: https://mobile.twitter.com/climateaudit ... 3566093312) but uploaded only on September 24 to also allow for hearsay to be the basis of a complaint. This reinforces the impression that the complaint is part of a larger intelligence operation. Who initiated the change?

[Biden] insists that, in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor solely because Biden believed that official was corrupt and inept, not because the Ukrainian was investigating a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, that hired Biden's son, Hunter, into a lucrative job.

There's just one problem.

Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents — many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles — conflict with Biden’s narrative.

And they raise the troubling prospect that U.S. officials may have painted a false picture in Ukraine that helped ease Burisma’s legal troubles and stop prosecutors’ plans to interview Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

For instance, Burisma’s American legal representatives met with Ukrainian officials just days after Biden forced the firing of the country’s chief prosecutor and offered “an apology for dissemination of false information by U.S. representatives and public figures” about the Ukrainian prosecutors, according to the Ukrainian government’s official memo of the meeting. The effort to secure that meeting began the same day the prosecutor's firing was announced.

Translation of the memo here:

https://www.scribd.com/document/4276161 ... ranslation

In addition, Burisma’s American team offered to introduce Ukrainian prosecutors to Obama administration officials to make amends, according to that memo and the American legal team’s internal emails.

The memos raise troubling questions:

1.) If the Ukraine prosecutor’s firing involved only his alleged corruption and ineptitude, why did Burisma's American legal team refer to those allegations as “false information?"

2.) If the firing had nothing to do with the Burisma case, as Biden has adamantly claimed, why would Burisma’s American lawyers contact the replacement prosecutor within hours of the termination and urgently seek a meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case?

...

... there is both a public interest and an ethics question to knowing if Hunter Biden and his team sought State’s assistance while his father was vice president.

The controversy ignited anew earlier this year when I disclosed that Joe Biden admitted during a 2018 videotaped speech that, as vice president in March 2016, he threatened to cancel $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, to pressure Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko to fire Shokin.

At the time, Shokin’s office was investigating Burisma. Shokin told me he was making plans to question Hunter Biden about $3 million in fees that Biden and his partner, Archer, collected from Burisma through their American firm. Documents seized by the FBI in an unrelated case confirm the payments, which in many months totaled more than $166,000.

Some media outlets have reported that, at the time Joe Biden forced the firing in March 2016, there were no open investigations. Those reports are wrong. A British-based investigation of Burisma's owner was closed down in early 2015 on a technicality when a deadline for documents was not met. But the Ukraine Prosecutor General's office still had two open inquiries in March 2016, according to the official case file provided me. One of those cases involved taxes; the other, allegations of corruption. Burisma announced the cases against it were not closed and settled until January 2017.


After I first reported it in a column, the New York Times and ABC News published similar stories confirming my reporting.

Joe Biden has since responded that he forced Shokin’s firing over concerns about corruption and ineptitude, which he claims were widely shared by Western allies, and that it had nothing to do with the Burisma investigation.

Some of the new documents I obtained call that claim into question.

In a newly sworn affidavit prepared for a European court, Shokin testified that when he was fired in March 2016, he was told the reason was that Biden was unhappy about the Burisma investigation. “The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,” Shokin testified.

“On several occasions President Poroshenko asked me to have a look at the case against Burisma and consider the possibility of winding down the investigative actions in respect of this company but I refused to close this investigation,” Shokin added.

Shokin certainly would have reason to hold a grudge over his firing. But his account is supported by documents from Burisma’s legal team in America, which appeared to be moving into Ukraine with intensity as Biden’s effort to fire Shokin picked up steam.