Joe Biden Bragged That, With Barack Obama's Permission, He Threatened To Withhold Billions in Aid to Ukraine Unless They Fired a Prosecutor Investigating His Son's Company.
And Now, The Deep State Refashions This as a Trump Scandal

From April 2019:

Two years after leaving office, Joe Biden couldn't resist the temptation last year to brag to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time as vice president that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor.

In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko.

“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat.

Interviews with a half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials confirm Biden’s account, though they claim the pressure was applied over several months in late 2015 and early 2016, not just six hours of one dramatic day. Whatever the case, Poroshenko and Ukraine’s parliament obliged by ending Shokin’s tenure as prosecutor. Shokin was facing steep criticism in Ukraine, and among some U.S. officials, for not bringing enough corruption prosecutions when he was fired.

But Ukrainian officials tell me there was one crucial piece of information that Biden must have known but didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.

Ukranian officials began looking into why this investigation was shut down, and offered information to US Attorney General Bill Barr.

[A]s Biden's 2020 campaign ramped up over the past year, Lutsenko — the Ukrainian prosecutor that Biden once hailed as a "solid" replacement for Shokin -- began looking into what happened with the Burisma case that had been shut down.

...

Lutsenko said some of the evidence he knows about in the Burisma case may interest U.S. authorities and he'd like to present that information to new U.S. Attorney General William Barr, particularly the vice president’s intervention.

"Unfortunately, Mr. Biden had correlated and connected this aid with some of the HR (personnel) issues and changes in the prosecutor's office," Lutsenko said.

Ukraine did in fact re-open the case -- without any bidding by Trump.

But the Ukrainian police failed to pursue the case aggressively, due to "external influence."

Nazar Kholodnytskyi, the lead anti-corruption prosecutor in Lutsenko's office, confirmed to me in an interview that part of the Burisma investigation was reopened in 2018, after Joe Biden made his remarks. "We were able to start this case again," Kholodnytskyi said.

But he said the separate Ukrainian police agency that investigates corruption has dragged its feet in gathering evidence. "We don't see any result from this case one year after the reopening because of some external influence,”"he said, declining to be more specific.

Reportedly, on July 25th, Trump urged the Ukranian president to re-open the case as well.

Perhaps he wanted the President to address this "external influence" blocking investigation of the matter.

And this is now an impeachable offense, according to the Democrat Party, its owned and operated media, and the NeverTrumpers. (But I repeat myself thrice.)

But it's an impeachable offense against... Trump?!?!!

Trump urged the Ukranians to look into a case of official corruption and unethical exertion of political pressure openly boasted of by Joe Biden himself and the guy who needs investigating is... Trump?!!?

Hey, AllahPundit, jerking yourself over your newest Jake Tapper Conspiracy Theory -- will the investigation you're masturbating over also probe Joe Biden's admitted billion dollar coercion of Ukraine, or would it "threaten the very foundations of our democracy" to investigate the actual crime here?

Wait, I know the answer: We just have to investigate the Trump Pressure part. The Biden Pressure part? That's just good ol' fashioned diplomatic log-rolling.

And I'm sure that determination has nothing to do with the fact that NeverTrumpers are backing Biden as a "moderate" candidate for president.

By the way: the Deep State source who illegally leaked this to the media (of course) doesn't even allege there was any quid pro quo -- just what xhe claims was an improper "urging" of action.

It's now illegal and impeachable for a president to urge a foreign leader to open a corruption probe?

The things one learns from our very educated and very rational NeverTrump Genius Brigade.

I wonder if Obama and Biden will also be prosecuted for sending out their agents to enlist the UK and Australia into a covert op against their party's opponent in the 2016 election...?

Make no mistake, the Deep State operatives NeverTrump has aligned themselves with are in actual legal jeopardy and could, maybe, be bound for prison.

This is their last-gasp attempt to persuade the liberal jurors at their trials to engage in Jury Nullification.

posted by Ace of Spades at 06:36 PM

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