Biden infamously bragged about threatening to withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine unless they fired the prosecutor who was investigating, what was that again? Oh yes, he was investigating corruption and money-laundering at Burisma, which had hired Hunter Biden to help get Burisma cleared to do business in the US.
The claim from the Obama Administration and the Biden Crime Family is that it was necessary to to fire this prosecutor for Ukraine to prove it was complying with anti-corruption stipulations to receiving aid.
I know it doesn't make sense that you'd fire someone investigating corruption to prove you were fighting corruption, but that's the story this gang of criminals and thieves has been going with for years.
But now State Department records reveal that Ukraine had been certified as being adequately vigorous in their anti-corruption measures -- which suggests that Biden was conducting his own private, profitable foreign policy when he demanded that Ukraine fire the prosecutor who his son's paymasters wanted fired.
Just weeks before then-Vice President Joe Biden took the opposite action in late 2015, a task force of State, Treasury and Justice Department officials declared that Ukraine had made adequate progress on anti-corruption reforms and deserved a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee, according to government memos that conflict with the narrative Democrats have sustained since the 2019 impeachment scandal.
"Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee," reads an Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizing the recommendation of the Interagency Policy Committee (IPC) -- a task force created to advise the Obama White House on whether Ukraine was cleaning up its endemic corruption and deserved more Western foreign aid.
The recommendation is one of several U.S. government memos gathered by Just the News over the last 36 months from Freedom of Information Act litigation, congressional inquiries and government agency sources that directly conflict with the long-held narrative that Biden was conducting official U.S. policy when he threatened to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee to force Ukraine to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, the country's equivalent of the American attorney general.
At the time the threat was made in December 2015, Shokin's office was conducting an increasingly aggressive corruption investigation into Burisma Holdings, an energy firm the State Department deemed to have been engaged in bribery and that employed Hunter Biden and paid him millions while his father was vice president.
New details on the impact of that probe have emerged in recent days.
Shokin's pursuit was rattling Burisma, and the firm was putting pressure on Hunter Biden to deal with it, according to recent testimony and interviews with Devon Archer, Hunter Biden's former business partner and fellow Burisma board member.
The memos obtained by Just the News show:
Senior State Department officials sent a conflicting message to Shokin before he was fired, inviting his staff to Washington for a January 2016 strategy session and sent him a personal note saying they were "impressed" with his office's work.
U.S. officials faced pressure from Burisma emissaries in the United States to make the corruption allegations go away and feared the energy firm had made two bribery payments in Ukraine as part of an effort to get cases settled.
A top U.S. official in Kyiv blamed Hunter Biden for undercutting U.S. anticorruption policy in Ukraine through his dealings with Burisma.
During Trump's first impeachment in late 2019, State officials testified that Hunter Biden's acceptance of a job at Burisma at a time when his father was vice president created the appearance of a conflict of interest but did not materially impact U.S. policy in Ukraine.
But in a private, classified email shared with Just the News, one of the top U.S. officials in the Kyiv embassy told then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch at the end of the Obama administration that Hunter Biden had, in fact, impacted the U.S. anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine.
"The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter's presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine b/c Ukrainians heard one message from us and then saw another set of behavior with the family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules," embassy official George Kent wrote to Yovanovitch in the Nov. 22, 2016, email marked "confidential."