Here is how Politico phrased it in their story. “Joe Biden successfully pressured the Ukrainian government to remove its prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, who was unpopular with Western leaders, threatening to withhold loan guarantees if it did not. At the time, Shokin's office had open probes of Burisma and Zlochevsky. Shokin’s successor closed the investigations, but then reopened an investigation of Burisma last year.”
Almost nothing in that statement is correct.
In May, when The New York Times began publishing Giuliani’s accusations in connection with Biden, Bloomberg did something that apparently no one else bothered to do—they sent reporters to Ukraine to look into the facts. Those reporters located both documents and officials connected with the case, and this is what they learned—there was no case open against Burisma. It wasn’t part of an “open probe” by anyone. That case was “shelved in 2014.”
In fact, it was the refusal of Shokin to reopen any investigation that generated calls for his ouster by officials in the U.K. While Politico waves off concerns about the prosecutor by saying Shokin was “unpopular with Western leaders,” he wasn’t unpopular—he was notoriously corrupt. And it was Shokin’s failure to cooperate with U.K. prosecutors in looking into Burisma that caused the U.K. to ask Biden to seek the Ukrainian prosecutor’s removal.
After Shokin was gone—several months and another administration change after Biden’s request—his replacement did in fact open a new investigation into Burisma. And eventually closed it, after finding nothing. But Biden’s request didn’t protect the company where Hunter Biden worked from some active investigation by a hard-charging prosecutor. It removed a corrupt prosecutor who had already shelved the case and brought in someone new who actually conducted an investigation.
Maybe Politico and The New York Times are convinced that every story about Trump, no matter how enormous, can be ignored, and that every papercut caused by a Democrat is cause for a major expose. But the least they could do when they’re shouldering aside extortion and abuse of power, is not to get the damn story upside down.
It appears that Trump didn’t need to go to Ukraine to generate false accusations against Joe Biden at all. There are plenty of people in the U.S. willing to do it for him.
Comments are closed on this story.