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Biden’s Rogue Ultimatum to Ukraine
Biden apologists on the left and center-right point to a list of international institutions that believed Viktor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma, was corrupt and had to go. These institutions comprise a Who’s-Who list designed to dazzle the Frums and Frenches of the world: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the G-7, and many more. “Everyone in the Western community wanted Shokin sacked…” senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Anders Aslund told the Wall Street Journal. At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, Aslund went so far as to include something called the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Well, if the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is onboard, say no more…
Readers may be forgiven for thinking that this argument from authority is just more fake news of the “51 former intelligence officials” variety. That’s because it is. More to the point, it is an attempt to recast then-Vice President Biden’s threat to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine not as a rogue threat, but a simple extension of Obama administration policy.
Elite concern over Shokin’s allegedly corrupt investigation of Burisma is nothing short of historical revisionism. But don’t take my word for it. Thanks to Freedom of Information Act litigation (“The hippies finally got something right!”) initiated by John Solomon’s Just The News, we can now be flies on the wall of numerous entities such as the Interagency Policy Committee, an Obama-era task force of State, Treasury and Justice Department officials:
“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.
Other internal memos obtained by Just the News show:
- Senior State Department officials sent a conflicting message to Shokin before he was fired, inviting his staff to Washington for a January 2016 strategy session and sent him a personal note saying they were “impressed” with his office’s work.
- U.S. officials faced pressure from Burisma emissaries in the United States to make the corruption allegations go away and feared the energy firm had made two bribery payments in Ukraine as part of an effort to get cases settled.
- A top U.S. official in Kyiv blamed Hunter Biden for undercutting U.S. anticorruption policy in Ukraine through his dealings with Burisma.
The New York Post’s Miranda Devine continues the thankless task of highlighting government officials scrambling to get their stories straight in light of Biden’s rogue ultimatum to Ukraine:
The European Commission praised Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin for his efforts to fight corruption in a December 2015 progress report published nine days after then-VP Joe Biden demanded his ouster.
The report flies in the face of Biden’s claims that the European Union joined his demands that Shokin be removed for being corrupt and obstructing anti-corruption reforms.
In fact, the Dec. 18, 2015, progress report, obtained by the New York Post, says that the European Union was satisfied that Ukraine had achieved “noteworthy” progress, including in “preventing and fighting corruption,” and thus was eligible for visa-free travel in Europe.
Trump’s “perfect phone call” looks more and more perfect with each new revelation of Biden’s corrupt dealings with Ukrainian energy oligarchs. It’s no wonder Democrats impeached him for it: he was directly over the target.
Published in Politics
You mean Joe told a stretcher? The devil you say!
I was waiting for the punchline, but there isn’t one.
The punchline is that the New York Times can read all about it in the Post. Again.
Yup.
Doesn’t all of this information make a joke out of the entire first impeachment effort?
How come all of this wasn’t discovered back then?
Do these revelations have any effect at all on the election of Biden and legality of his doing whatever he has been doing as president?
We have more lawyers in Washington than we have congressional aides–that’s a lot of lawyers. It seems to me that we have a lot of new questions that need to be answered.
Terrific job of putting all of this together in one place. Keep it up please.
That’s the Narrative they’re crafting for Biden’s bragging about getting Shokin fired?
No big deal. Everybody knew. No scandal here. Basically “Dude, this was six years ago! We’re still talking about the most mundane thing!”
I suppose because that approach has worked before, why not try again?
It was known back then. And the first impeachment was always a joke. A shame that people who called themselves “conservatives” treated it as legit. But they just wanted Trump gone by any means necessary.
They should have — they did — back during Election 2020, but our media covered for Joe and so-called conservatives wanted the Orange Man gone.
Old questions that persist, actually. But maybe because now that it seems the Dems want Joe gone, they no longer try to hide this stuff.
Doesn’t this information also indict Obama as, at the least, an enabler of the Biden Crime Family? How does the proposed $1 billion in aid get reneged on the say-so of VP Biden otherwise? I don’t think Obama took advice from Biden on much of anything other than to ask Joe what he thinks about some foreign policy issue and then do the opposite of whatever Jos suggests.
At the very least we have Obama to thanks for Biden’s unlikely presidency at the twilight of his (Biden’s) career.
All of the orders Obama supposedly put in place during his administration to prevent corruption were resoundingly ignored by Hillery and Joe (and likely many others). Obama knew of it all and did nothing about it. So either Obama is as corrupt as they are, or he had no control over his own administration and his own appointees, and hence, is not the political genius that everyone seems to think he is. Just an impotent figurehead if he really intended to curtai corruption in his adminitration. Or he was the most corrupt president in history now with stiff competition from Biden, or he was hapless. Which? YOu decide.
Thinking more about this . . . you know, even if we accept this at face value, it does lead one to wonder why all these international organizations wanted Shokin sacked.
Or, to put it another way, why they wanted an investigation into Burisma halted. What was there to be found that would embarrass all these organizations? Or what illegalities would be discovered?
While they’re using this “everyone wanted him sacked” as a defense of Biden, doesn’t it equally suggest that all these organizations are just as guilty as Biden of deep, deep corruption involving Burisma?
I wonder which Obama would pick: gangsta or derp?
He could be both, of course, but I don’t think his ego would allow him to go derp.
In much the same way as Harry Reid enabled a Party with the White House and a slim majority in the Senate to get its chosen candidates on to the Supreme Court, the current Democrats have made impeachment an everyday political tool.
The funny thing is that they are so convinced that they are the natural Party of government, that they never see how their machinations could come back to bite them.
Bribery is an impeachable offense. It could also be considered treason when bribes are taken from America’s enemies (cough) China (cough).
Of course we’re not pleased with the Democrats who pulled this stunt impeachment, along with Russia collusion and whatever else. But we are absolutely furious with Republicans who time and time again got in bed with this nonsense because they didn’t like Trump. Sown, reaped, we’re screwed now.
There’s a special place in Hell for Paul Ryan, not because he was worse than the rest, but because his position at the time really needed a better man. His defection to the other side cost us an awful lot. Imagine if instead of the House melting away to Democrat control and our own Speaker simply up and QUITTING, the Russia collusion and Ukraine corruption had been treated like any other Democrat plot and stymied by the GOP. It’s reasonable to think that Trump with a booming economy and a string of Foreign Policy wins (even the haters admit it so long as they do not currently actually work for Joe) would have been center pillar of a big tent revival, uh so to speak. Not a tent revival, but a revival of muscular big-tent conservatism.
It’s almost too terrible to look at in the mind’s eye, isn’t it? Elected Republicans abandoned Trump in droves while lecturing us about Russia and Ukraine, shame on Trump, can’t support him.
Now the years and the corrosive judicial fascism have taken their toll, and even I find it difficult to support Trump, yet I am increasingly likely to, based on the deep state mutiny and coup. We are LOSING this country, and if we will not even engage in peaceful civil disobedience whle the left riots and pillages, terrorizes and imprisons, what the Hell good are any of us?
We don’t like their tactics — they are winning. Well, I don’t like our tactics, and most of all I loathe those on “our side” whose sole contribution is to throw rocks at our people who will fight. Democrats gonna Democrat — it’s Republicans who made the difference for Marxist fascism in America.
Great post, @daviddeeble.
Well, statistically speaking, they’re safe.
Exactly right. Infuriating. The GOP hates us only slightly less, and needs us only slightly more, than the Democrats do.
I don’t think it ever has. Even when they’re out of power. It’s not like Republicans are going to turn on them, exercise power, or bring them to heel.
One doesn’t have to join too many dots to get from Harry Reid to a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
Fantastic work, David! Thanks ever so much for this stellar article!
The price our children and grandchildren will pay for this nonsense from the spitball right will be steep indeed.