UkraineGate: MSM believed Biden’s narrative, but documentary reveals ousted prosecutor had 6 cases against Burisma

21 Jan, 2020 16:01 / Updated 2 hours ago

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(L) Viktor Shokin © Global Look Press/ZUMAPRESS/Sergii Kharchenko; (С) Joe Biden © REUTERS/Mike Blake; (R) Yuriy Lutsenko © Global Look Press/ZUMAPRESS/Nazar Furyk 

Joe Biden pushed to oust the top Ukrainian prosecutor who had six cases against gas firm Burisma, where Hunter Biden sat on the board of directors. A new documentary is challenging the narrative that the media failed to check.

Burisma Holdings is a major private Ukrainian gas company, with headquarters in Cyprus, which employed Biden’s son Hunter from 2014 to 2019. The firm’s name surfaced last year when it was alleged that Donald Trump pressured his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky to open a probe into the firm – and his Democratic rival Joe Biden.

The claims snowballed into ‘abuse of power’ and ‘obstruction of Congress’ charges, which eventually led to the impeachment of President Trump by the House of Representatives on December 18. Trump has denied any wrongdoing, with his lawyers describing the row as a “dangerous perversion of the Constitution.”

When Joe Biden lobbied Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to replace Ukraine’s top prosecutor Viktor Shokin with Yuriy Lutsenko in 2015, his entourage claimed that Shokin had failed to thoroughly investigate corruption, and by pushing for his replacement “saint” Biden even acted against his family’s interests.

But the second episode of the documentary series ‘UkraineGate: Inconvenient facts’ produced by French investigative journalist Olivier Berruyer, founder of popular anti-corruption and economics blog Les Crises, shows information that undermines this narrative.

The American media reported that Shokin’s case against Ukrainian energy company Burisma had gone “dormant,” and that by pressing for Lutsenko’s appointment, Biden was quashing corruption, even if that meant subjecting his own son to investigation in the process. Hunter Biden was on the company’s board from 2014 till 2019. However, documents collected by Berruyer show that Shokin’s Burisma probe was far from “dormant.” Shokin himself even told ABC News that his office had six investigations into Burisma open at the time of his resignation.

Lutsenko, he said, “stopped all those cases.”

ABC didn’t air this part of the interview, and the American media – including the Washington Post and the New York Times – continue to label Shokin’s investigation “dormant,” despite a number of publicly available documents showing otherwise and presented in the documentary.

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One day after Lutsenko’s appointment, Biden called Poroshenko to welcome the announcement, and to inform him that the US would move forward with a $1 billion aid loan to Ukraine.

The cases against Burisma and its head Mykola Zlochevsky were closed under Lutsenko for various reasons. The company paid around $7 million in taxes, but it’s a fraction of the $70 million that Lutsenko himself said the company owed.

Berruyer does not claim that Shokin is an incorruptible public servant, and says that there are two hypotheses for the reasons for investigation. Either he wanted to punish criminal activity, or he may have been motivated to pursue the Burisma case to seize the assets of the company’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, before shaking the oligarch down for a bribe.

“In any case, this issue doesn’t change anything about the main point, Joe Biden’s involvement. Since the investigations were moving forward, he de facto helped the oligarch, voluntarily or not,” Berruyer said.

The second episode of the documentary is already available online, with two more to come.