Remember this scene? In 2018, Joe Biden bragged that he forced Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko to fire state prosecutor Viktor Shokin in 2015 by holding up $1 billion in US aid over Shokin’s supposed corruption. “I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars,” Biden tells the audience. “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,” Biden said, laughing:

Shokin indeed got fired, an outcome that Biden claimed that the US and our allies required as a step toward correcting the corruption. However, a newly released memo from the State Department undermines the entire basis of Biden’s extortion on Poroshenko. Not only had the Obama administration assessed Shokin favorably before Biden’s trip to Kyiv, they had already approved the billion-dollar aid package:

Just weeks before then-Vice President Joe Biden took the opposite action in late 2015, a task force of State, Treasury and Justice Department officials declared that Ukraine had made adequate progress on anti-corruption reforms and deserved a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee, according to government memos that conflict with the narrative Democrats have sustained since the 2019 impeachment scandal.

“Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee,” reads an Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizing the recommendation of the Interagency Policy Committee (IPC) – a task force created to advise the Obama White House on whether Ukraine was cleaning up its endemic corruption and deserved more Western foreign aid.

The recommendation is one of several U.S. government memos gathered by Just the News over the last 36 months from Freedom of Information Act litigation, congressional inquiries and government agency sources that directly conflict with the long-held narrative that Biden was conducting official U.S. policy when he threatened to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee to force Ukraine to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, the country’s equivalent of the American attorney general.

If Biden wasn’t conducting official US policy, whose policy was he conducting by using US aid as a lever to force Shokin out? Certainly not the State Department’s, as John Solomon and Steven Richards discovered:

The memos obtained by Just the News show:

• Senior State Department officials sent a conflicting message to Shokin before he was fired, inviting his staff to Washington for a January 2016 strategy session and sent him a personal note saying they were “impressed” with his office’s work.
• U.S. officials faced pressure from Burisma emissaries in the United States to make the corruption allegations go away and feared the energy firm had made two bribery payments in Ukraine as part of an effort to get cases settled.
• A top U.S. official in Kyiv blamed Hunter Biden for undercutting U.S. anticorruption policy in Ukraine through his dealings with Burisma.

That last bullet point makes it plain that even in 2015, US officials had suspicions about Hunter Biden’s business connections to Burisma, and through that to corrupt Ukrainian officials. Just the News provides a copy of that memo, which names Hunter specifically and his connection to Burisma oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who hired Hunter to serve on Burisma’s board. The November 2016 memo, as well as the memo that initiated it, makes clear that Zlochevsky had been trying to rehabilitate himself with Kyiv and the West, “particularly with us,” despite maintaining his corrupt practices. The implication here was that Hunter was Zlochevsky’s gambit to gain that rehabilitation, and the State Department wanted then-VP Biden to rein in his son, pronto:

But why target Shokin? Biden and his allies have insisted that Shokin dragged his feet on corruption probes, obstructing reform and putting US aid at risk. Put aside the fact that Hunter’s presence at Burisma made US policy appear hypocritical on these points, as the memo noted a year after Biden’s strongarming of Poroshenko. An FBI whistleblower alleges that Zlochevsky wanted Shokin out of the way after the prosecutor continued to investigate his activities, and that may have been passed along to “The Big Guy”:

An FBI whistleblower has alleged Biden pushed for Shokin’s ouster because he was investigating gas company Burisma, where his son Hunter had an $80,000-a-month seat on the board of directors despite having no expertise in its business.

The source said that Burisma CEO Mykola Zlochevsky claimed he had “bribed” the Bidens for $5 million each — partly to get Shokin fired.

That certainly would be in character for Zlochevsky. It also explains why Biden would have pushed for Shokin’s firing just six months after Victoria Nuland, the Obama administration’s point person for Ukraine at that time, sent Shokin a letter praising his efforts to combat corruption:

Victoria Nuland, the State Department’s top point person on Ukraine at the time, even sent Shokin a letter that summer praising the prosecutor for his work combating corruption in the former Soviet republic.

“We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government,” Nuland writes in the June 2015 letter. “The challenges you face are difficult, but not insurmountable.[“]

They weren’t insurmountable until Joe Biden went to Kyiv. American corruption apparently trumped Ukrainian corruption in the end, and Hunter Biden profited from the damage.

Jonathan Turley writes today that the memos shred Biden’s defense. It might also explain why House Democrats refused to hold fact hearings on the first impeachment of Donald Trump, an error they would repeat in the second:

When I testified before the House Judiciary Committee at the only impeachment hearing, I told the committee it should not depart from history and proceed to an impeachment without fact witnesses on the grounds for impeachment.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Adam Schiff and others refused.

It now seems there was material evidence that would have been used at the impeachment trial.

Trump was alleging there was a conflict of interest with the Bidens, and the evidence could have challenged Biden’s account and established his son’s interest in the Shokin firing.

The nicest conclusion one could draw was that any question of Biden corruption was irrelevant to the crime alleged — using the presidency’s powers to dig up dirt on potential political rivals. That was what House Democrats argued then. What it looks like now, though, is that House Democrats may have known that this would blow up in their faces, and so they eliminated any potential for these facts to come out at that time.

Now, with Republicans in charge of the House, a real investigation with fact witnesses and document subpoenas can take place. Had it taken place five years ago, Democrats might have found someone else to run in 2020 and avoided a potential political debacle in this cycle. Let that be a lesson to both parties.