If Hunter Biden hadnt been a director of a company under investigation, Joe Biden did nothing wrong.
Anyone who's paid attention to geopolitics knows that Eastern Europe countries especially are rife with corruption. It's how things get done. When that regime changes significantly, the leaders and grifters get out with everything they can get their hands on. {Where do you think all those Russian Oligarchs came from?}
Which leads the successor to launch investigations into the old players. Usually the International banks get involved.
Such was the case when the Russian leaning government was tossed out.
But it's tricky. So the government legal eagles look for something to point out they're doing their jobs and rooting out the bad guys without pissing off too many of the powers that be.
Almost nothing was coming out of these investigations
- AT THE SAME TIME, the UK found a company whose financial twists and turns had a bad smell.. let's say it was Burisma, and energy company with questionable lease licensing practices. They froze its assets - a piddly 28 million, small potatoes when billions are unaccounted for.
So with UK begging Ukraine for information on this company and help in prosecuting a fraud case, it would make sense for Ukraine's prosecutor to go after that company.
So since lots of people including the US wanted SOME results, Joe Biden pressed for action. Thing is one company loaded up its board with Americans who had connection. That was Burisma. And the folks were.. Hunter Biden and Devon Archer, a close acquaintance of Chris Heinz, John Kerry's stepson.
So the highest profile (and lowest impact) target for the sacrificial sheep was 'shielded.. or so it thought. Evidently Shokol didnt get that message and was going for the easy.
The bottom line was that Biden's demand to have that Prosecutor fired in order to get a Billion in loan guaranty was taken a whole different way by Ukraine. He was fired alright and Ukraine refused UK requests for cooperation.
And to this day nothing has got done on any of the corruption
SOMEHOW.. despite Biden's strongarm 'Soft Politics' tactics, getting Prosecutor fired, nothing changed. Except Burisma was no longer a target anywhere. Go figger.
Read this about the UK Serious Fraud Office case against Burisma.. scroll 3/4 down.. and how it fell apart after/despite Joe Biden demanding the Prosecutor be fired, to release 1 billion in loan guaranty
So, that's a good thing, right? Maybe the SFO case could get somewhere and reforms made.Change could only be won when international lenders forced President Poroshenko to act. It was tough talk from the west that obliged Ukraine’s parliament – long referred to sarcastically as the biggest business club in Europe – to create the anti-corruption bureau and a dedicated anti-corruption prosecution service. And it was only the bluntest of language from US officials that forced the Ukrainian government to fire crooked prosecutors. According to a valedictory interview by the former vice president Joe Biden in the Atlantic, Poroshenko only sacked the lawman blocking Kasko’s reforms because Biden made a direct threat. “Petro, you’re not getting your billion dollars,” Biden said he had told Ukraine’s president. “You can keep the [prosecutor] general. Just understand, we’re not paying if you do.”
Well.. except there's other ways to dodge metaphorical bullets and scrutiny.
The credibility of the United States was not helped by the news that since May 2014, Biden’s son Hunter had been on the board of directors of Burisma, Zlochevsky’s company. The White House insisted the position was a private matter for Hunter Biden, and unrelated to his father’s job, but that is not how anyone I spoke to in Ukraine interpreted it. Hunter Biden is an undistinguished corporate lawyer, with no previous Ukraine experience. Why would a Ukrainian tycoon hire him?Well.. according to some, it's $83,000 a month, which Hunter is still drawing.
Hunter Biden failed to reply to questions I sent him, but he told the Wall Street Journal in December 2015 that he had joined Burisma “to strengthen corporate governance and transparency at a company working to advance energy security”. That was not an explanation that many people found reassuring. The Washington Post was particularly damning: “The appointment of the vice president’s son to a Ukrainian oil board looks nepotistic at best, nefarious at worst,” it wrote, shortly after Hunter Biden’s appointment. “You have to wonder how big the salary has to be to put US soft power at risk like this. Pretty big, we’d imagine.”
So.. Joe Biden's brag about getting a Prosecutor fired for stonewalling the corruption investigations, such as SFO's, all came to nothing.
And fell apart.
Much deeper look here: The Hunt for Burisma Date 2/19/2015
Now we come to Trump's calls to the new Ukrainian chief. He wants investigations into this and other corruption scandals according to him.
Which is exactly the same as Biden claimed. Except that the allegedly and probable corrupt Prosecutor Biden got fired was deflecting attention from bigger fish to the Small potatos Burisma case.
Bottom line is that Biden actually DID what Dems want to accuse Trump of.
