Old-Dutch he threatened to withhold US aid to Ukraine unless they sacked a prosecutor looking into corruption in Burisma?
Dutchy it breaks my heart to see you rolling out this nonsense. Not only was this a rumour that started on Facebook, it was entirely debunked by EU diplomats involved with bringing down Shokin but also by Senate Republicans themselves once they had completed their own investigation.
Shokin was installed in 2015 to help root out the corruption of the previous Poroshenko Govt. In 2016 Shokin was found to be continuing with the same decrepit corruption which had the Ukraine as one of the most corrupt countries on the planet. EU diplomats at the time began to focus on the department Shokin was running, the Prosecutor General’s office. Not only was Shokin crooked he hadn’t investigated or made one arrest, so Biden leveraged the aid as a means to get them to honour their mandate.
Daria Kaleniuk, the co-founder and executive director of the Anti Corruption Action Centre in Kyiv, Ukraine, credited the US Govt, the International Monetary Fund — which threatened to delay $40 billion in aid for similar reasons — and others with the prosecutor’s removal. There were several civil society groups in Ukraine calling for Shokin’s removal.
This is important, Shokin was NOT investigating Burisma in 2015-2016. Shokin investigated them in 2014 for money laundering and tax irregularities. The probe focused on 2010-2012 according to
the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, an independent agency that has worked closely with the FBI. When Hunter Biden was not even employed by Burisma.
This was all found in the Republican probe, which was a huge embarrassment for Comer in particular who said, “Just because this is the way the investigation turned out doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen the way we see it.” Make of that what you will but the bottom line is this was a right wing fantasy that started on Facebook and was completely debunked.
Thats why its right to go after Trump, and its right to maintain the truth because that’s something thats become increasingly loose.
Edit: the Burisma investigation, which began in 2014 for the years 2010-2012, was settled in court in 2017. A few months later Trump asked Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden.
FUCKING NONSENSE
