President Donald Trump faces impeachment calls for soliciting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to have former Vice President Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden investigated. The president keeps voicing the false allegation against the Bidens, but he’s getting pushback from Steven Pifer, who was United States Ambassador to the Ukraine during the tail end of the Clinton administration.
Utter bulls*t.
VP Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion loan guarantee because Ukrainian Prosecutor General Shokin was not doing his job. US officials, EU officials, IMF and most Ukrainians wanted him canned. Moreover, Shokin was not investigating Biden’s son. https://t.co/VexYo6ZcuZ— Steven Pifer (@steven_pifer) September 29, 2019
The White House released documents this showing that yeah, Trump did ask Zelensky to investigate the Bidens.
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great,” Trump apparently said in a July 25 call (the document was marked as not being a verbatim transcript). “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.”
The allegation from team Trump is that Joe Biden, then vice president, got Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin pushed out for investigating Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Hunter Biden was on the board of directors for this business. Shokin indeed claimed that he was pushed out because he was running the investigation into the company.
At the time of Shokin’s 2016 resignation, however, he faced pressure over international concerns he wasn’t investigating corruption. Former Ukrainian and U.S. officials said that the investigation into Burisma owner and former Ukrainian minister Mykola Zlochevsky was “dormant,” according to The Washington Post.
[Image via Mark Wilson/Getty Images]
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