In a never-ending effort to bury the New York Post’s story claiming that emails were found on a computer formerly owned by Hunter Biden that document Hunter’s role in setting up a meeting between his father and a Burisma executive, Twitter created a “moment” on the trending topics section of the site claiming:
“Joe Biden did not push out a Ukrainian prosecutor for investigating his son, The Washington Post confirms.”
Let's Go to the Tape: Twitter Moment Claims WaPo 'Confirmed' NY Post Story Is False
Well, then, that settles it. The Washington Post, beacon of reliable journalism, has confirmed something that’s directly contradicted by video of Joe Biden himself, among other things.
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2016, Biden said:
I remember going over and convincing our team, others, to convince that we should be providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.
So they said they had—they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. 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. Well, son of a b-tch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
So, we know Biden got the prosecutor fired. But was it due to an investigation into Burisma and Hunter Biden? We know that the left is claiming that there was no investigation into Burisma and Hunter Biden and that, in fact, Viktor Shokin was fired for not investigating Burisma. Why would Biden want him fired for that reason? It makes no sense. As our Nick Arama covered, Shokin himself said in a sworn affidavit that he was looking into Burisma and was pressured to stop the investigation so that Ukraine would receive aid from the United States.
He alleges, “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. Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors. I presume Burisma, which was connected with gas extraction, had the support of the US Vice President Joe Biden because his son was on the Board of Directors.”
He claimed that Poroshenko asked him to consider winding down the investigation but he refused to close it. He claimed Poroshenko told him if he didn’t stop investigating Burisma the US via Biden would refuse to release the money.
As Nick also said, there is more evidence to support Shokin’s claim:
But what adds more support to the claim that Shokin was in fact investigating Burisma, beyond his own word, was that there was an attempt by Shokin’s office to seize the property of the Burisma founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, as this article from the Kyiv Post on Feb. 4, 2016 shows. Now that sure looks like an investigation to me.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other. People might not have liked Shokin, they might have wanted to put Shokin aside and it could have given Biden the happy excuse to get Shokin canned.
But it is true that after the move against the Burisma founder in February that Shokin was, in fact, canned in the next month, in March 2016.
Not only is Twitter censoring relevant information about a possible major crime and upcoming presidential election; they’re openly peddling disinformation.
