Hmmmm. Victor Shokin — the top Ukraine prosecutor whom then-Veep Joe Biden got fired in April 2016 for alleged malfeasance — sure was popular with the rest of the Obama administration.
That love shines through in newly unearthed documents:
“We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government,” gushed the State Department’s Ukraine point person Victoria Nuland to Shokin in summer 2015.
“Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee” of aid money, noted another federal functionary that October.
So why did Biden single him out for disposal?
One thing we know: It sure did help his son Hunter.
Remember: Shokin was fired right as he was breathing down the neck of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
And Burisma, you’ll recall, had made ne’er-do-well Hunter a board member with a sky-high salary despite his literal zero experience either in global business (other than influence-peddling) or energy exploration and exploitation.
Do we have to draw a picture here?
Look: As late as January 2016, the CIA was dumping on claims that Shokin was crooked.
When rumors started to buzz in-country that further aid money was tied to Shokin’s ouster, the agency responded with a literal “Yikes.”
So said agency Ukraine expert Eric Ciaramella, later adding (of a DC meeting with senior leaders from Shokin’s office): “We were super impressed with the group, and we had a two-hour discussion of their priorities and the obstacles they face.”
“Super impressed” does not sound anywhere close to “this guy is crooked and must go.”
Biden’s turned the tale of his move against Shokin into one of his fake tough-guy anecdotes, bragging to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018 that on his December 2015 trip to Kyiv, “I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a b—. He got fired.”
But it sure doesn’t sound like anyone else in the White House thought Shokin was corrupt.
You know who did consider Shokin bad news, though?
Hunter’s former partner, Devon Archer.
Archer told former Fox host Tucker Carlson on his new show that Shokin “was a threat.”
Why? Because “he ended up seizing assets” from Burisma’s owner Mykola Zlochevsky, who reportedly told a credible FBI informant that he had paid $10 million in bribes to Hunter and Joe.
And Archer has testified before Congress that Zlochevsky and fellow Burisma big Vadym Pozharsky asked Hunter in December 2015 to make a call to DC to help relieve the “pressure” they were feeling from Shokin.
In other words: Biden’s biggest Ukraine smokescreen has been utterly blown apart.
The president has risibly said of the affair: “I did nothing wrong. I carried out the policy of the United States government in rooting out corruption in Ukraine.”
But the claim that Shokin — whose remit was to root out corruption within Ukraine — was crooked always smelled bad.
And now we have the receipts showing this stinks to high heaven — and indicating (yet again) that Joe is almost certainly lying about Hunter’s corruption and his own.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
