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If there’s one thing we can say about Joe Biden, it’s that he’s a jerk who can’t keep his mouth shut. Over the years, Dems and the media have tried to turn Joe’s arrogance into endearing “gaffes.” Let’s be clear: Joe isn’t a lovable guy who occasionally misbehaves; he’s an arrogant guy who thinks he’s better than everyone else. This character flaw has gotten him into hot water several times. His combination of pathological lies, rude comments and excessive bragging always backfires on him. Case in point: his on-camera bragging about successfully lobbying Ukraine to fire prosecutor Shokin.
That revelation became a Pandora’s box for Joe Biden that he never saw coming. However, his administration had a strategy: they chose to frame the removal of this Ukrainian prosecutor as a matter of US/European policy, suggesting that Joe was merely carrying out directives.
All nonsense, according to a report by Miranda Devine in the New York Post, which reports that, despite Biden’s claim, “the Europeans were NOT trying to impeach Ukraine’s prosecutor against Hunter’s company.”
The European Commission praised Ukraine’s attorney general, Viktor Shokin, for his efforts to fight corruption in a progress report released in December 2015 nine days after then-Vice President Joe Biden called for his removal.
The report disputes Biden’s claims that the European Union joined his demands that Shokin be removed for being corrupt and obstructing anti-corruption reforms.
Indeed, the December 18, 2015 progress report, obtained by the New York Post, says that the European Union was satisfied that Ukraine had made “remarkable” progress, including in “preventing and fighting corruption,” and was therefore eligible for visa-free travel to Europe.
The European Commission noted that Shokin had just appointed the head of a specialized anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, which it described as “an indispensable component of an effective and independent institutional framework to combat high-level corruption.”
And, of course, there’s the Victoria Nuland angle: She lied to cover Biden’s tracks.
The State Department memos included a personal letter from top US official Victoria Nuland to Shokin telling her that Secretary of State John Kerry was “impressed” with Shokin’s progress.
But Biden, Nuland and others later claimed that the then-vice president was simply carrying out official US policy and that European officials agreed that Shokin was corrupt and should be removed.
“It was a policy that was closely coordinated with the Europeans, with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank. But not only did we not see progress, we saw it [Prosecutor General’s Office] it goes back in that period,” Nuland, now Biden’s assistant secretary of state, told the Senate Homeland Security and Accountability Committee in 2020.
So did this Atlantic Council clown:
Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, told the Wall Street Journal in 2019: “Everyone in the Western community wanted Shokin fired… The whole G-7, the IMF, the EBRD [the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development]everyone was united because Shokin had to go, and the spokesman for that was Joe Biden.”
However, none of the European bodies cited ever specifically called for Shokin’s removal or even mentioned his name.
Instead, two months after Biden’s lobbying campaign began, bodies such as the IMF issued statements broadly criticizing Ukraine’s “slow progress” in fighting corruption.
Meanwhile, Solomon reports that another influential international body was singing the praises of Ukraine’s anti-corruption reforms during Shokin’s tenure.
So it seems everyone believed Shokin was doing an excellent job fighting corruption, except Joe Biden. Why the exception? Most likely because Shokin was diving into the extensive corruption at Burisma, where Biden’s troubled son Hunter was conveniently “employed.” Even stranger is why the entire establishment lied to cover Simple Joe’s tracks. Time of responsibility.
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