Recent memos have brought into question whether former Vice President Joe Biden’s move to conditionally withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine was aligned with US government policy. Biden and other Democratic leaders have consistently stated that his call for the removal of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokhin in December 2015 was in line with America’s anti-corruption stance towards Ukraine.
Biden had openly talked about threatening then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko with the withdrawal of a vital $1 billion loan guarantee if Shokhin wasn’t removed. This was further highlighted in a conversation he shared with the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018.
Interestingly, before his dismissal, the State Department had commended Shokhin’s efforts and even invited him for a strategy session in Washington in early 2016. An audio tape from March 2016 seemingly captured a discussion between Biden and Poroshenko, where Poroshenko indicated that no concrete evidence of corruption was found against Shokhin.
“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 bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
The controversy gains traction as Shokhin had been probing Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company that employed Biden’s son, Hunter, in 2014 with a significant monthly salary, despite Hunter lacking relevant qualifications. Devon Archer, Hunter’s business partner, and a Burisma employee, conveyed to the House Oversight Committee that the investigation was causing distress within Burisma, and the company’s leadership was pressing Hunter to intervene.
“Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee,” read an October 1, 2015, memo by the Interagency Policy Committee (IPC), a Barack Obama task force.
This episode became a focal point in 2019 during the impeachment proceedings against then-President Donald Trump. Trump had requested Poroshenko’s successor, Volodymyr Zelensky, to delve into the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine. During the impeachment, Democratic representatives and officials asserted that Biden’s decision regarding the aid was unrelated to his son and perfectly in line with US policy in Ukraine. However, with these recent findings, such claims seem debatable.
A key point in this narrative is the revelation that lawyers defending Trump during his impeachment were unaware of these memos, which indicated the Obama administration’s satisfaction with Shokhin’s efforts. These documents might have potentially influenced the impeachment process.
“Despite the fact that we didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I especially asked him … No, it was the day before yesterday. I especially asked him to resign,” Poroshenko allegedly told Biden in a tape released in 2020 by then-parliamentarian Andrii Derkach.
Furthermore, in 2020, allegations against Hunter Biden surfaced from a reported “laptop from hell”, which was initially dismissed by various institutions as “Russian disinformation”. Later investigations confirmed the authenticity of the materials on the laptop.
