Liberal Forum

A week after then-Vice President Joe Biden began pressuring Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor in late 2015 by withholding U.S. loan guarantees, the European Union reached internal consensus in a memo saying that Prosecutor Viktor Shokin’s office and the country at large had met its goals for fighting corruption, organized crime and human trafficking.The newly revealed memo directly undercuts the narrative crafted by Democrats during Donald Trump’s first impeachment and sustained during the 2020 presidential election, namely, that Biden fired Shokin over U.S. and European concerns that he wasn’t fighting corruption aggressively enough.At the time, Shokin was investigating the activities of energy company Burisma Holdings. And Hunter Biden -- who had no experience in the energy industry -- was being paid at least $83,333  a month by Burisma.“Based on these commitments, the anti-corruption benchmark is deemed to have been achieved,” the European Commission, a key governing body of the EU Parliament, declared in a December 18, 2015 report that gave a generally rosy assessment of Ukraine’s pace of reforms and specifically the efforts of Shokin’s Prosecutor General Office.The report, obtained by The New York Post and Just the News, noted that Shokin, just a few months on the job, had already established a special national anti-corruption prosecutor’s office to aid the newly formed FBI-approved investigative unit called the National Anti-Corruption Bureau. “On 30 November, the General Prosecutor appointed the head of the specialized anti-corruption prosecution,” the EU report noted, urging Shokin to continue to refine the appointment and safeguard it to ensure the office remained independent and free from influence.The report approvingly noted numerous other commitments Shokin and other Ukrainian leaders made to fast-track and build on the progress they were making reforming anti-corruption tools and policies.Calling Shokin's work "an important step forward" the report continued to say that “The progress noted in the fifth report on anti-corruption policies, particularly the legislative and institutional progress, has continued." The EU added that "civil society continued to play a key role in moving the anti-corruption agenda forward,” the report said, in one of the most glowing the Commission had given Ukraine since 2015.Most notably, the report made no mention of firing Shokin or withholding any Western aid.You can read the full report here.File
 EU-SixthReportUkraineVisaLiberalization.pdf
The report’s tone matches the recomendations of internal State Department documents made public by Just the News late last month that show a task force of State, Treasury and Justice Department experts had recommended in October 2015 that Ukraine had indeed made adequate progress in fighting corruption and deserved to receive $1 billion in new U.S. loan guarantees when Biden traveled to Ukraine in December 2015. Biden disregarded that information.
 
 

File
 UkraineTaskForceLoanGuaranteeMemo.pdf
The State memos also included a personal letter in which top U.S. official Victoria Nuland personally told Shokin her boss Secretary of State John Kerry and the department was “impressed” with Shokin’s progress.File
 NulandtoShokinJune2015.pdf

The emergence of the U.S. and European documents in 2023 directly conflict with the story Biden gave starting in 2019 about why he took the extraordinary action of withholding the U.S. loan guarantee until then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko fired Shokin, who at the time was escalating a corruption probe against the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings that was paying his son Hunter millions of dollars.Biden and his defenders claimed he was simply carrying out the U.S. policy recommendations of career officials and that European officials were in agreement that Shokin was corrupt and needed to be dismissed.“It was a policy that was coordinated tightly with the Europeans, with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank.  But not only did we not see progress, we saw the PGO go backwards in this period,” Nuland, now Biden’s Undersecretary of State, told the Senate Homeland Security and Accountability Committee in 2020 testimony.File
 2020-09-03-Nuland Interview with Exhibits.pdfAdded former top U.S. envoy Kurt Volker: “When Vice President Biden made those representations to President Poroshenko he was representing U.S. policy at the time. And it was a general assumption I was not doing U.S. policy at the time but a general assumption among the European Union, France, Germany, American diplomats, U.K., that Shokin was not doing his job as a prosecutor general. He was not pursuing corruption cases.”Joe Biden himself picked up the excuse. "I did nothing wrong,” the future president said during 2019 CNN-New York Times debate. “I carried out the policy of the United States government in rooting out corruption in Ukraine. And that’s what we should be focusing on.”But the State Department records show Biden was urged to do the opposite: give the loan guarantee and Shokin and his team more time. The EU documents also show there wasn’t alarm in Europe, at least not in December 2015 when Biden told Poroshenko for the first time he wanted Shokin fired.In fact, the EU issued a public statement on Dec. 18, 2015 with even more encouraging words than the report, praising Ukrainian officials who had made “enormous progress.”“I congratulate the Ukrainian leadership on the progress made towards completing the reform process which will bring important benefits to the citizens of Ukraine in the future. The hard work towards achieving this significant goal has paid off. Now it is important to keep upholding all the standards,” EU Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos declared at the time.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/ ... tive-about
 

sounds like Shokin needs to come to the US to do some vestigatin!

sunburn » 08 Sep 2023, 8:02 am » wrote: ↑

08 Sep 2023, 8:02 am

sounds like Shokin needs to come to the US to do some vestigatin!

Yes, and needs to testify in front of Congress ......
which the Dems kiboshed the first time around ......


 

Nice find, the left will have trouble spinning this information!