The accusation is that Biden blackmailed Ukraine’s new leaders into firing the country’s chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to derail an investigation he was leading into a Ukrainian gas company that the vice president’s son, Hunter, was paid to advise.
The truth, Kaleniuk said, is that Shokin was forced from office at Biden’s urging because he had failed to conduct thorough investigations of corruption, and had stifled efforts to investigate embezzlement and misconduct by public officials following the 2014 uprising.
There is no question that Biden did, during a visit to Kiev in late 2015, threaten to withhold$1 billion in loan guarantees unless Shokin was dismissed. But the vice president, who was leading the Obama administration’s effort to fight corruption in Ukraine, did the country a favor by hastening Shokin’s departure, Kaleniuk said, since he had failed to properly investigate corrupt officials.
By getting Shokin removed, Biden in fact made it more rather than less likely that the oligarch who employed his son would be subject to prosecution for corruption.
Indeed, hiring the vice president’s son might have seemed to Zlochevsky like a way to protect his business from scrutiny by international investigators. But the facts show that the Obama-Biden administration strenuously opposed the decision by Ukrainian prosecutors to let Zlochevsky off the hook.
Although there is no evidence that Joe Biden did anything to shield Burisma from scrutiny, the fact that he failed to dissuade his son from helping to launder the reputation of a Ukrainian company widely suspected of corruption is hardly praiseworthy. The former vice president says that he simply never discussed his son’s business interests in Ukraine, but maybe he should have.
“What I’m pissed off about,” Kaleniuk said, “is that Shokin, who was totally corrupt, who undermined the reform of prosecution, and reformers, and who didn’t want to investigate Zlochevsky, now appears in the New York Times as the hero who wanted to investigate Zlochevsky and Burisma and who suffered because Joe Biden demanded to dismiss him because of his willingness to investigate Burisma — which is absolute nonsense.”
Kaleniuk was also distressed that the Times report, and Vogel’s tweet promoting it, failed to clearly debunk the false claim that the prosecutor Joe Biden got fired “had opened a case into a company that was paying HUNTER BIDEN.” In fact, Kasko and Kaleniuk noted, Shokin had undermined efforts to investigate the company and its owner.
https://theintercept.com/2019/05/10/rumors-joe-biden-scandal-ukraine-absolute-nonsense-reformer-says