The Shokin firing wasn’t about corruption after all. Who would have thought?
Joe Biden’s bragging about his threats to withhold aid to Ukraine unless the prosecutor Shokin was fired always had a strong stench of corruption and protection of his son Hunter. Always. And yet the MSM and many others insisted it was done because it was Shokin who was so corrupt.
Back in 2019 and 2020, I wrote posts on Shokin. Rather than recap everything, I’ll just link to a couple of those posts: this as well as this. The latter quotes this piece by lawyer “shipwreckedcrew” that appeared in mid-October 2020, just a few weeks before Biden’s election. Here are some excerpts:
The media has propagated a fictional account of why Biden demanded Shokin’s firing, and that account has been repeated over and over again to the point that it is now conventional wisdom. The reason for the fictional account was to provide a rationalization for Joe Biden’s demand that appeared to support a crackdown on corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs by blaming Viktor Shokin for inaction and thereby justifying Biden’s demand that he be fired.
That story is a lie. It was a cover story offered to divert attention from the fact that Joe Biden demanded the firing of Shokin so that an allegedly corrupt Ukraine oligarch could be quietly exonerated, which was a plan all along because the Oligarch in question was paying Hunter Biden nearly $1 million a year for the benefit of having access to such influence. And we now know that Hunter Biden was the frontman for illicit streams of income going to several members of the Biden family, including Joe Biden himself.
The media and the Democrats made sure little to nothing of this reached the general American public. But now we have more confirmation via State Department documents:
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.
Is the MSM covering the story now? I just checked via both Google and DuckDuckGo for any articles in the past week on the subject, and all that came up were sources on the right. If you can find something I missed, please provide links in the comments.
Quid pro Quo Joe always delivers.
Here is a sobering interview by Tucker Carlson of Col McGregor on Ukraine.
Those who are devoted to the Ukraine mess will ignore this but it is real.
Mike K:
First of all, your link has nothing to do with the subject matter of this post.
But far more importantly, I have dealt with MacGregor previously. Read this post from April of 2022, subtitled “being wrong over and over doesn’t seem to stop Colonel MacGregor.”
The man has never had anything to say that came true. And yet Tucker Carlson is still using him as an authority, and you believe MacGregor’s statements are well worth paying attention to. Why does none of this surprise me?
And I suppose it’s possible that MacGregor might end up being correct once or twice in his life – stopped clock and all that. But I’ve not seen it happen yet.
Colonel Mac Greagor, or Lt. Colonel Vindman, or ex-Marine Scot Ritter; who to believe? None.
Two (MacGreagor and Ritter) push Vlad’s lies, the other, Mr. Quid pro Quo, pushed the Dems lies.
Neo the obvious answer is that if the damning information regarding Biden acting opposite of the position of the government is not covered by the MSM it is because it cannot be linked to either Trump or climate change.
stephen mcintyre one of the leading anti interventionists has most of the receipts about kolomoisky and privat bank, about burisma and their deep ties into western europe and the us, it’s rather striking how hard they strive to ignore all of this,
what is amusing in an ironic sense, is how publications like the kyev post, who covered the story in 2016-7, pretended something else had happened in 2019-2020
I guess we will see who is right, neo.
“Mike K:
First of all, your link has nothing to do with the subject matter of this post.”
I apologize for intruding on your topic. I thought it was Ukraine corruption.
Mike K:
I said it was FAR more important that you were linking to a guy who has never never never been right about Ukraine. Yes, you “intruded on my topic,” but I wouldn’t have even bothered to mention that if it hadn’t been for the fact that you were linking to a MacGregor interview, someone who is consistent only in his wrongness.
And I’m curious why you thought the topic of the post was Ukraine corruption. It was actually LACK of Ukraine corruption; it was Biden’s allegation that the prosecutor Shokin was corrupt when he didn’t seem to have been especially corrupt and had been deemed by the State Department not to have been corrupt. Biden demanded he be fired for alleged corruption when in fact that corruption he was investigating was Burisma’s, the company Hunter worked for. The corruption the post is about is Joe Biden’s corruption.
Mike K:
As I said about MacGregor, he has never been right before. I added that I suppose it’s always possible that he could be right about something in the future, much as a stopped clock is right twice a day. But why link to an interview with someone who has been repeatedly and consistently wrong, as I noted in my older post about him? That is the point.
“The Shokin firing wasn’t about corruption after all.”
It was not about Shokin’s being corrupt. It is evidence of Biden’s corruption, and perhaps that of Obama, too.
I was foolish enough to, if not exactly believe Joe’s people, then to at least think that their explanation might possibly have some merit and deserved to be heard. I’ve learned from that (or I hope so). Like Brian Stelter says, there aren’t two sides to every story. Brian’s side (and Joe’s) is usually wrong.
If you watched the interview, which I don’t expect you to do, you would see where Ukraine corruption come in. But again, I apologize and won’t bother you again.
Mike K:
He wuves his Tucker and his MacGreggor.
Confirmation bias. The colonel and tucker tell him what he needs to hear.
Here is a sobering interview by Tucker Carlson of Col McGregor on Ukraine.
I’m familiar with Col MacGregor, he is a loon. And I’m rapidly losing respect for Tucker.
Neo, please take another look at Mike K’s original comment. He’s hardly a troll, just a long-time (and interesting , valuable) commenter who perhaps missed the exact point you were apparently trying to make, and commented about a related topic. Your comment, “why does none of this surprise me” was not like you.
Fwiw, I’m an infrequent commenter but not a concern troll. I’m just someone who REALLY likes your blog and (most of) your commenters, enough to have donated to the blog in past campaigns.
Um, Abraxas, you seem to have forgotten the golden rule here—no doubt because you are a decent person—THAT golden rule being:
They are lying about everything (as in
E V E R Y T H I N G).
One would like (or prefer)—as decent people—to give them the benefit of the doubt…but they have shown us time and time again that doing so would be imprudent (IOW stupidity squared).
They don’t care; moreover they think WE’RE stupid.
No point (at this stage of the game) to oblige them.
Ilana:
I agree that Mike K is a regular and valued commenter here. My annoyance is at MacGregor himself, and at Tucker Carlson for treating him as some sort of authority. Tucker should know better, but he’s been pretty terrible on the subject of Ukraine, and so what doesn’t surprise me is that Tucker gives MacGregor any credence at all, and that viewers who aren’t familiar with MacGregor’s extremely flawed prognostications also give MacGregor credence he doesn’t deserve.
MacGregor is the Steven Seagal of military pundits.
had shokin remained, maybe privat bank might have collapsed with less that 6 billion in tax payer dollars,
so who actually has been right about this bloodbath in the caucasus, if not mcgregor,
perhaps since I read love and fate, I’m less sanguine on these prospects,
the escambray rebels held out for four years against the cuban government, but they were ultimately rounded up, many were sent to the umap camps, thats the version of the ‘happy fun camp’ they want for us,
similarly bandera held out for four years against the soviet and polish forces in the Carpathian mountains, like of him like the Caucasus version of William Wallace, with exception, but ultimately he had to retreat and was brought low in Munich in 1957
the former happened around the time the people who botched giron beach, decided you know we need to make a bigger mess 5,000 miles away,
e e cervantes:
Why the props for MacGreggor who may someday be right about something, but is mostly just spouting RT spin?
Have you ignored who propped up Fidel for 40 years? It wasn’t Ukraine.
miguel,
It’s my understanding that Bandera spent most of the war in German custody, not in Ukraine. Am I wrong about this? I thought that Mykola Lebed, Bandera’s henchman and Nazi collaborator par excellence, actually directed operations in Western Ukraine by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which included the Volhynia Massacre of some 130,000 Poles in the region.
Ukrainian insurgents fought on against the Soviets for a few years after the end of WWII, but where eventually crushed by Red Army forces in large-scale military operations that are largely unknown and unreported to the West
However: in October 1956 a Red Army armored formation from Ukraine, sent into Budapest to nip the Hungarian Revolution in the bud, promptly went over to the Hungarian side and fought alongside Hungarians in their doomed struggle against the Soviets.