Joe Biden And Ukraine
Joe Biden’s presidential campaign blasted out a mass email over the weekend seeking to raise money from reports that President Trump discussed the former vice president during a July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Entirely missing from the brazen fundraising email is the larger context of the story, which spotlights significant questions about Biden’s role in Ukraine policy under the Obama administration. This took place during a period where his son, Hunter Biden, received $50,000 a month from a natural gas company there.
Ukraine in 2016 removed a key prosecutor probing alleged corruption involving the same firm paying Hunter Biden. Joe Biden two years later admitted to personally threatening to withhold loan guarantees from Ukraine unless the prosecutor in question, Viktor Shokin, was removed.
None of that was mentioned in the Biden campaign’s fundraising email, sent under the subject line of “about Ukraine,” with donation options from $5 to $250, linking to the ActBlue donation site.
Biden, meanwhile, boasted about his role in the removal of Shokin during a panel discussion sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018.
“I remember going over (to Ukraine), convincing our team…that we should be providing for loan guarantees.… And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from (then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko) and from (then-Prime Minister Arseniy) Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor (Shokin). And they didn’t…,” Biden said.
“They were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, … we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, ‘You have no authority. You’re not the president.’ … I said, call him. I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. … I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’”