The US president was lobbied to stop an investigation into the energy company Burisma, where his son Hunter was a top executive, Viktor Shokin has said
Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. © AFP PHOTO/ PRESIDENTIAL PRESS-SERVICE/ MICHAIL PALINCHAK
Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin has claimed that Joe Biden, while serving as US vice president, received a bribe from a Ukrainian energy company in exchange for helping to get him fired in 2016.
In an interview with Fox News released on Friday, Shokin said that Biden pressured then-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko to fire him over his investigation into Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden, the incumbent US president’s son, served at the time.
The ex-prosecutor argued that both Poroshenko and Joe Biden understood that if he had been allowed to continue his probe into Burisma, it could have provided “the facts about the corrupt activities” by Hunter Biden, Devon Archer – the company’s another American executive – and other people involved.
However, Poroshenko offered a different version of events, insisting that Shokin was fired because of his failure to fight corruption in Ukraine.
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Shokin said that he had a “firm personal conviction” that both Joe and Hunter Biden had their palms greased in connection with the Burisma case. “They were being bribed. And the fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in US money in exchange for my dismissal, my firing – isn’t that alone a case of corruption?” he asked.
The ex-official was referring to a 2018 interview in which Joe Biden boasted that in 2015 he threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees from Poroshenko unless Shokin was let go. “Well, son of a b***h, he got fired,” Biden said.
However, White House spokesperson Ian Sams dismissed Shokin’s claims, chiding Fox News for “giving a platform for these lies to a former Ukrainian prosecutor general whose office his own deputy called ‘a hotbed of corruption.’”
The allegations of quid pro quo involving Joe and Hunter Biden were raised by Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley in June, when they released a bombshell FBI informant file. According to the document, a “highly credible” confidential source was allegedly told by Burisma owner Nikolay Zlochevsky that Joe and Hunter Biden received $5 million each to use their political influence in Kiev.
