Ukrainian prosecutor: I WAS fired for investigating Hunter

Joe Biden

Citing a sworn affidavit prepared for a European court, former Ukraine inspector general Viktor Shokin testified he was told that the reason he was fired in March 2016 was because Joe Biden was unhappy with his probe of a natural gas company that was paying the vice president's son $50,000 a month.

The Hill investigative reporter John Solomon reported Shokin was fired within hours of Joe Biden's threat to withhold $1 billion in aid if the Ukrainian president did not fire the prosecutor.

Biden is on video, at a Council on Foreign Relations event, boasting of his threat.

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.

The prosecutor, who was fired, was leading a corruption investigation into a company that employed Biden's son, Hunter pic.twitter.com/xZd3vIMbuL

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) September 20, 2019

Shokin testified: "The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors."

Democrats, in their self-described impeachment inquiry, essentially have accused President Trump of doing what Biden has admitted doing.

Solomon explained Biden "insists that, in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor solely because Biden believed that official was corrupt and inept, not because the Ukrainian was investigating a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, that hired Biden's son, Hunter, into a lucrative job."

However, Solomon reports that hundreds of pages "of never-released memos and documents — many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles — conflict with Biden’s narrative."

The documents raise the "troubling prospect" that U.S. officials may have provided false information about Ukraine "that helped ease Burisma’s legal troubles and stop prosecutors’ plans to interview Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election."

He noted for example that Burisma’s American legal representatives met with Ukrainian officials just days after Biden forced the firing of Shokin and offered an apology for dissemination of false information by U.S. representatives and public figures' about the Ukrainian prosecutors, according to the Ukrainian government's official memo of the meeting.

The effort to secure that meeting began the same day the prosecutor's firing was announced, Solomon said.

"In addition, Burisma’s American team offered to introduce Ukrainian prosecutors to Obama administration officials to make amends, according to that memo and the American legal team’s internal emails."

Solomon reasons: "If the Ukraine prosecutor’s firing involved only his alleged corruption and ineptitude, why did Burisma's American legal team refer to those allegations as 'false information?'"

And he argues that if the firing had nothing to do with the Burisma case, Burisma’s American lawyers would not have contacted the replacement prosecutor within hours of Shokin's termination seeking an urgent meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case.

Prosecutors in Ukraine tried to deliver such information to the Department of Justice in 2018 "fearing it might be evidence of possible violations of U.S. ethics laws.

First, they hired a former federal prosecutor to bring the information to the U.S. attorney in New York, who, they say, showed no interest. Then, the Ukrainians reached out to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

There are more suspicious facts, he noted, as Burisma hired Hunter Biden just weeks after the vice president was asked by President Obama to oversee U.S.-Ukraine relations.

A New York Times story also alerted Biden’s office that Shokin had an active investigation of Burisma and its founder.

What followed was an effort to alter the narrative.

"Hunter Biden's American business partner in Burisma, Devon Archer, texted a colleague two days after the Times story about a strategy to counter the ['new wave of scrutiny' and stated that he and Hunter Biden had just met at the State Department," Solomon wrote. "The text suggested there was about to be a new 'USAID project the embassy is announcing with us' and that it was 'perfect for us to move forward now with momentum.'"

The text raises further questions, and Solomon has filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the State Department to answer them.

"There is both a public interest and an ethics question to knowing if Hunter Biden and his team sought State’s assistance while his father was vice president," he explained.

In fact, Shokin said he was planning to question Hunter Biden about "$3 million in fees that Biden and his partner, Archer, collected from Burisma."