State investigators to probe Biden & the firing of Victor Shokin

Please consider this by way of a PSA, as it’s hard to imagine that I’ll have the wherewithal to even read, much less respond to any comments.

From the WaPO, Feb. 28, 2020: (I won’t bold anything)

“KYIV —A court ruling in Ukraine has forced state investigators to open a probe into alleged pressure by then-vice president Joe Biden that led to the 2016 dismissal of Viktor Shokin as the country’s prosecutor general, officials said Thursday.

President Trump last year pressed Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky for an investigation of this kind, leading to Trump’s impeachment by the House and his eventual acquittal in a Senate trial.
Shokin’s firing, however, was not a unilateral action directed by Biden. It was prompted by a push for anti-corruption reforms developed at the State Department and coordinated with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Trump and his allies have put intense pressure on Zelensky’s administration to open investigations into Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden who sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company Burisma.

From late 2018 Shokin met with Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, as Giuliani sought political dirt on the Bidens. Shokin has long been angered by what he sees as an unfair dismissal following foreign pressure.

Shokin has claimed he was pushed out by Biden because he tried to launch a probe into Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma. In fact, Ukrainian investigations into Burisma related to the period before Hunter Biden joined the board.” [snip]

““The fact that it was opened after a decision of the court indicates that first the SBI didn’t open this case, but the attorneys of Shokin made the SBI open this case,” she said.”

(the rest of the spin is here)

OTOH: ‘UkraineGate: MSM believed Biden’s narrative, but documentary reveals ousted prosecutor had 6 cases against Burisma’, 21 Jan, 2020, RT.com

“Joe Biden pushed to oust the top Ukrainian prosecutor who had six cases against gas firm Burisma, where Hunter Biden sat on the board of directors. A new documentary is challenging the narrative that the media failed to check.

Burisma Holdings is a major private Ukrainian gas company, with headquarters in Cyprus, which employed Biden’s son Hunter from 2014 to 2019. The firm’s name surfaced last year when it was alleged that Donald Trump pressured his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky to open a probe into the firm – and his Democratic rival Joe Biden.

The claims snowballed into ‘abuse of power’ and ‘obstruction of Congress’ charges, which eventually led to the impeachment of President Trump by the House of Representatives on December 18. Trump has denied any wrongdoing, with his lawyers describing the row as a “dangerous perversion of the Constitution.”

When Joe Biden lobbied Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to replace Ukraine’s top prosecutor Viktor Shokin with Yuriy Lutsenko in 2015, his entourage claimed that Shokin had failed to thoroughly investigate corruption, and by pushing for his replacement “saint” Biden even acted against his family’s interests.

But the second episode of the documentary series ‘UkraineGate: Inconvenient facts’ produced by French investigative journalist Olivier Berruyer, founder of popular anti-corruption and economics blog Les Crises, shows information that undermines this narrative.”

[RT. links to the 40 minute version, and has embedded the summary version video of Part II]

The American media reported that Shokin’s case against Ukrainian energy company Burisma had gone “dormant,” and that by pressing for Lutsenko’s appointment, Biden was quashing corruption, even if that meant subjecting his own son to investigation in the process. Hunter Biden was on the company’s board from 2014 till 2019. However, documents collected by Berruyer show that Shokin’s Burisma probe was far from “dormant.” Shokin himself even told ABC News that his office had six investigations into Burisma open at the time of his resignation.”

Lutsenko, he said, “stopped all those cases.” [snip]

“ABC didn’t air this part of the interview, and the American media – including the Washington Post and the New York Times – continue to label Shokin’s investigation “dormant,” despite a number of publicly available documents showing otherwise and presented in the documentary.”

(cross-posted at caucus99percent.com)