The former prosecutor at the heart of the Ukraine controversy was pressured to drop a probe into a gas company linked to former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, according to notes from a private conversation he had with presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani’s notes, as cited by Fox, say that “Mr. Shokin attempted to continue the investigations but on or around June or July of 2015, the U.S. Ambassador [to Ukraine] Geoffrey R. Pyatt told him that the investigation has to be handled with white gloves, which according to Mr. Shokin, that implied do nothing.”
‘He Got Fired’
Shokin was fired in April 2016, amid long-standing charges of corruption. In March of the same year, Joe Biden threatened to cut off $1 billion in guaranteed loans to Ukraine unless Shokin was dismissed.“The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine, and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,” Shokin wrote.
Shokin said former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko came to him multiple times and asked him to close down the probe into Burisma but the prosecutor refused.
“In my conversations with Poroshenko at the time, he was emphatic that I should cease my investigations regarding Burisma. When I did not, he said that the U.S. (via Biden) were refusing to release the USD$ 1 billion promised to Ukraine. He said that he had no choice.”
President Donald Trump has claimed the reason Biden wanted Shokin fired was due to the Burisma probe, out of consideration for the interests of his son.
“I don’t know any reason to investigate Joe Biden or Hunter Biden according to Ukrainian law,” said Yuriy Lutsenko, who stepped down last month. “It is the jurisdiction of the US,” he said, adding that any “possible embezzlement” at Burisma “happened two or three years before Hunter Biden became a member of the board.”
The possibility of a probe in a jurisdiction other than Ukraine was echoed by Gennady Druzenko, who in the years 2014-2015 held the post of government ombudsman in Ukraine. Druzenko told The Epoch Times that while “Ukrainian officials have said on numerous occasions that all of the Bidens’ actions in Ukraine were lawful,” there remains the potentially unsettled question of whether U.S. laws may have been broken.
“The question of whether Joe or Hunter Biden breached U.S. law while the latter was receiving an unusually high fee from Burisma, or while pressuring the previous Ukrainian president to fire the Prosecutor General of Ukraine who investigated the Burisma case, is still open,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s former prime minister has called for a renewed investigation into Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma.
“If, using his knowledge, he played an active role then there’s nothing scandalous about it,” Azarov said, referring to Hunter Biden’s role at the company. “But if he was simply on the books and getting money, then that could be seen as a violation of the law.”
Azarov added that he believes allegations from Giuliani and others that Joe Biden got Ukraine’s prosecutor general fired to protect his son should also be investigated.
