International Affairs: September 2019 Archives
This video has been floating around the blogosphere for months, but apparently the mainstream media wasn't aware that Vice President Joe Biden bragged about using American leverage to force Ukraine to fire the prosecutor who was investigating his son.
Joe Biden brags about how he threatened to pull $1 billion in loan guarantees from Ukraine if it didn't immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) September 20, 2019
The prosecutor, who was fired, was leading a corruption investigation into a company that employed Biden's son, Hunter pic.twitter.com/xZd3vIMbuL
From Hot Air:
Note well that Biden leaves out the context of what the prosecutor was investigating at the time of Biden's insistence on getting him fired. He was quarterbacking a corruption probe targeting Burisma, which was paying Hunter Biden a fortune ($50,000 a month at the time). In fact, it seems a little weird without that context as to why foreign aid to Ukraine depended on the person filling a state prosecutor's office at all. What foreign-policy interest would the identity of a state prosecutor -- an internal affair -- have involved that would derail a billion-dollar aid package to an ally in desperate need of the cash?And yet, here was Biden bragging last year that "son of a bitch, he got fired" -- after Biden explicitly used the authority of his office and the president's to get rid of the man looking into his son's employer. Even if one assumes Donald Trump attempted to pressure Volodymyr Zelenskiy into reopening the Burisma probe, it can't be any worse that the explicit quid pro quo demanded by Biden ... in his own words.
I don't know what Trump said on the phone to Ukraine's leadership, but I'm pretty confident that Joe Biden used his authority as Vice President to protect his son Hunter Biden.
