Did Joe Biden Abuse His Power as Vice President to Shield His Son From Legal Scrutiny?

No.

By
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In the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses on Monday, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida is running a television ad targeting Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden in the Des Moines media market.

Introducing himself over a dramatic piano riff as “one of the jurors in the U.S. Senate,” Scott argues the “real story” of the impeachment trial is “the corruption Joe Biden got away with.”

“Vice President Biden threatened a foreign country,” Scott continues, “and forced them to fire a prosecutor who was investigating a company paying his son $83,000 a month.”

Scott is far from the only Republican to make this claim. Sen. Ted Cruz argued last month that as vice president, Biden “bragged publicly about withholding $1 billion in aid until Ukraine fired the prosecutor investigating Burisma, the company paying his son $1mm/yr.” Pam Bondi, a member of President Trump’s impeachment team, made a similar case during the trial this week. The White House itself promoted a video of Joe Biden speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations event in 2018, saying the former vice president “threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless a prosecutor was fired.”

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  1. Sean

    This article points to an interview in which Shokin’s former deputy stated that investigations into Burisma’s owner Zlochevsky were shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015, well before Joe Biden demanded in early 2016 that Shokin be fired. This fact purports to demonstrate that “in reality” the elder Biden did not use his post to intervene and protect his kid from criminal exposure. But if the prosecution was “shelved,” and obviously inactive, then how did it come to be that Zlochevsky’s assets were seized by Shokin’s office on February 2, 2016, under a continuing criminal investigation? https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/322395.html 47 days later Biden demanded that Shokin be fired.

    When it is said that “Republicans in Congress didn’t make a stink about this move at the time,” what move is being referred to, the firing of Shokin? Why should they make a stink about that at the time if all of Joe Biden’s relevant activities were not yet known? Furthermore, at that time they likely were willing to resolve doubt in favor of the U.S. government official, instead of immediately resolving it against the official based in large part on their personal dislike for him or based on their desire to exclude him from public office because they dislike his policies. At any event if the Republicans have concluded that the rules of the game now permit political execution hit jobs on one of their members before all the facts are clarified, and largely based on personal animus, wouldn’t one expect that these politicians would respond in kind? (Perhaps not if it becomes apparent that public opinion punishes any party voting without justification to impeach the President, which in modern times appears so far to have been the result).

    If Republicans signed a letter urging further reforms what is this supposed to signify?

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    Bud

    So, we are to consider Trump's initiatives, delivering nothing for himself or the US, more disturbing and an impeachable offense. However, the Biden's involvement with a corrupt company in a corrupt country with a long trail leading to more economically self serving deals in China can be dismissed as nothing, even when a wealthy copartner also with political ties became so uncomfortable with what he was observing, he abruptly quit. You can only write a couple of paragraphs of Trump's action before we would fall asleep. The Biden caper story however could be the the replacement to the popular series "Homeland" . The problem we are concerned with is not Joe's glibness bragging about his influence and political power. He has been doing that forever. The issue is him being used by corrupt countries, companies and his son's hedge fund.

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    Brian Andrews

    Hunter Biden Burisma thing is not nepotism. Nepotism would be if Hunter worked for Joe or another Biden in a position which he was not qualified or was qualified but well overpaid compared to others doing similar work within the organization.

    Hunter Biden arrangement is corrupt and smacks of pay for access / protection. The fact that publicly available information doesn’t have an answer to this is why it’s legit to investigate.

    Yeah Trump saw an opportunity to damage his likely (?) political opponent, Joe Biden and tried to leverage aid to do so. However, the corruption is there, and real and Trump can point to it.

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      JohnF

      Webster's dictionary defines "corruption" as: a) dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as government officials or police officers); b) inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (such as bribery).

      Hunter Biden was likely hired in the hopes that he might be able to bring in business (because of his connections and his name), but no one has yet been able to show any evidence of any crimes or bribes to public officials. Despite all of Rudy's efforts, he hasn't been able to find (or manufacture) any evidence of side-deals or contracts being issued due to Hunter's relationships. If you know of any that can be demonstrated and verified, I'm sure we'd all be happy to hear about them.

      In the meantime, consider whether or not the definition of corruption I included above describes the actions that Rudy, Parnas and team took to have the US Ambassador to Ukraine removed in exchange for information from the then-Prosecutor-General of Ukraine (a foreign government official) that would discredit Joe Biden.

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        Kevin Durant?

        “but no one has yet been able to show any evidence of any crimes or bribes to public officials.”
        ———————————-
        Yes that is precisely what investigations are for

        There was no publicly available evidence that Manafort had misstated his income on a mortgage application.....until there was Mueller

        Procuring evidence is literally what investigations are for

        They are begun on the basis of ‘articulable suspicion’. If you don’t think there is articulable suspicion in this instance, I cannot help you further

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          Paul Montagu

          Investigations usually when there is some actual evidence of actual wrongdoing. There is none. There is no evidence that Shokin was investigating Burisma or Zlochevsky when he was sacked.

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            Paul Montagu

            ...usually start...

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          JohnF

          You haven't helped me yet.

          We know exactly why Hunter Biden got those positions. He got them because his father is a prominent US politician. That's also why Don Jr. made $50K for giving a speech and why the RNC bought thousands of copies of his book. As Pat Riot has pointed out, sometimes this is a marketing exercise. George Schultz and Henry Kissinger had no expertise in blood testing or building start-ups, yet they were on the Board of Directors of Theranos. Just putting their names on a list added credibility to the company (which failed spectacularly). Eric Cantor left Congress and promptly got a $2M/year job on Wall St., despite not having any experience in that sector. Should that be investigated? Or can we just assume that he was hired for his name and his contacts? Should we go through the long list of family members of past and current politicians (as well as the politicians themselves) who have traded off their family names and investigate them all?

          Burisma is a private company. It hired Hunter Biden for its own reasons and it set and paid a salary that most people think is too high. We may (and probably should) find it distasteful, but it's not illegal. If you can point to an actual crime, then do so and I will join you in demanding an investigation of that crime.

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            Kevin Durant?

            “We know exactly why Hunter Biden got those positions. He got them because his father is a prominent US politician. That's also why Don Jr. made $50K for giving a speech and why the RNC bought thousands of copies of his book.“
            ——————————
            If the DNC wants to give Hunter $391 million to give a speech I’m fine. That’s not corruption. That’s just a waste of money by the DNC.

            If the SEC commissioner’s son gets $10,000 from Goldman Sachs, I have questions

            If the EPA Administrator’s cousin gets hired by British Petroleum, I have questions

            If MoveOn.org hires Hunter Biden for $90k/mo I have no questions and don’t care

            These are clear distinctions you understand but are pretending not to

            Really, the most offensive part about Hunter’s influence peddling is that he has 10,000 opportunities to get paid for nothing in DC. He chose Ukrainian oligarchs and Chinese state-owned banks

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            Kevin Durant?

            “Eric Cantor left Congress and promptly got a $2M/year job on Wall St., despite not having any experience in that sector. Should that be investigated?”
            ———————————
            Yes

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  4. Q22

    One question: What happened to the Burisma investigation after Shokin was fired?

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      JohnF

      Depends on which investigation you're talking about. Burisma was accused of tax evasion and ultimately paid back taxes of around $6.85M. The investigations into Burisma's owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, that relate to his activities that pre-date Hunter Biden's arrival on the scene have stopped and started at various times (he has been accused of misappropriating funds and granting himself profitable contracts while he was Minister of Natural Resources in the Yanukovych Government). As of last September, the new Government was taking another look at these activities (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-whistleblower-ukraine-buris-idUSKBN1WC1LV)

      Shokin's successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, is on record as saying both that Burisma was under investigation and that Burisma was never under investigation.

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        Brian Andrews

        Your opening sentence says it.

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    Mary Sursavage

    If Biden wanted the prosecutor fired for not investigating Burisma and others, why didn’t the new prosecutor investigate them? You only tell part of the story. If Hunter Biden worked for a suspected corrupt company receiving US aid money while his father is handing out the aid, why isn’t that worth investigating?

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      JohnF

      Let's add that to the list of distorted facts that have arisen. Searching the web for "did burisma receive US aid" yields several articles with headlines like: "Ukraine Gas Firm Paid $1.8B in US Aid". Most of them reference the work of Peter Schweizer of Breitbart. However, if you actually read the articles, the only connection made is that Joe Biden supported loan guarantees made by the US, the EU, and the IMF (which totalled around $1.8B) and that Hunter Biden was paid some $3M by Burisma. Apart from the headline, there's no real connection made between the two amounts and no real evidence given that Burisma actually received ANY US Aid Money. This story also appears to be perpetuated by some FOX Opinion hosts (who haven't offered any evidence of this).

      https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/article/2019/nov/11/no-proof-biden-or-kerry-channeled-us-aid-ukraine-b/

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    Earl King

    While this individual claim may or may not be obvious corruption you are overlooking the entire story. Mendacious? I wish I knew. Start at the beginning. Hunter was put in the boards of Amtrak and MBNA. Why? What was he doing on Air Force II picking up a diamond and a billion dollars. Joe brother is making out in Costa Rica using US Aid. His family glom of Uncle Joe is corruption. Whether you are shilling for him or not

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      JohnF

      That story about Hunter and China is completely false. Hunter is a part-owner of a company that is a part-owner of a joint venture partnership to own a slice of a company (30%) that manages a hedge fund. That company, Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), set out to raise $1B for the fund which has now grown to $2.1B, largely raised from Chinese Banks. Those banks expect that BHR will produce an annual return for them and ultimately give them their money back. As with most Hedge Fund Managers, BHR earns a small percentage of the total assets under management as well as a percentage of the return. As of last October, the company had yet to pay anything in the way of dividends to its owners ( At best, Hunter owns 5% and has yet to make any money from the deal).

      Nevertheless, this story has been distorted into a fiction that has Hunter leaving China with a billion dollars in a suitcase.

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        Earl King

        Why would they do business with Biden? Because he flew on Air Force II with his father. Why did that Chinese businessman give him a Diamond? Given Joe's brother has apparently done well in Costa Rica, (after Joe went there) using an US Aid program the family seems to trade of Joes name. Burisma wanted something Hunter was selling something. Finally explain how Hunter got the boards of AMTRAK and MBNA Bank...again posts he had no experience for. Something smells....

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          JohnF

          So let's start out with some honesty. In your initial post you said:

          "What was he doing on Air Force II picking up a diamond and a billion dollars."

          My response pointed out that he did not actually pick up a billion dollars. The Chinese diamond story was a new one to me so I had to wade through a few Right-Wing media sites this morning to figure out what you were talking about. It turns out that the story involves a different Chinese businessman (completely unrelated to BHR) who he was dealing with in 2017 (after his father was out of office). This was four years after the BHR deal was signed. The BHR deal was negotiated six months before Joe Biden's trip to China and was completed and signed a month before.

          The only words in your statement/question that are remotely true are "Air Force II".

          You can see my answer to your second comment in my response to Kevin Durant below.

          I am not saying any of this to defend the Bidens, I am just tired of the false narrative that has been developed and propagated by FOX News, Breitbart, and fringe right-wing media sites. The title of this column is "The Dispatch Fact Check." It exists, along with other similar sites and organizations, because we are inundated daily with "information" that is provably false. That misinformation is then widely disseminated and is accepted by partisans because they want to believe it. This is not healthy for society.

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      Pat Riot

      Because his father is famous. See also the son of Warren Buffet, every high-profile CEO, sports figures, and so on. Companies use their Board as a marketing tool.

      Of course if there was any *actual* crime going on there the DOJ and the Republican House would have investigated this years and years ago....

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    Pat Riot

    The fact that Biden was doing the exact *opposite* of what Republicans are alleging shows you what we're up against in this era of "alternative facts".

    And the idea that Republicans are going after Biden's children in the context of the *actually corrupt* Trump children also tells you who is using lies more effectively this cycle.

    The broader context is that Trump and his family's corruption is absurd and off the charts, and any other president's own party would have long abandoned him. Instead the Republicans are doubling-down and doubling-down again on Trump, and because of that they need to make up increasingly obvious lies about the other side in order to defend him.

    But make no mistake, this is the new Republican playbook: for every awful thing Trump is caught doing, just say "Democrats did it too" regardless of what it even is. Like the victims of Trump University, there are millions who desperately don't want to find out they've been conned and that their dream was all a lie.

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      Terry Koch

      I wonder: When a new President and Congresspeople of either party but with greater respect for facts and truth are in office, will facts and truth matter again in the public square, or is the damage irreparable? Has something in society permanently changed? Does the cause lie outside politics, predating this administration?

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      Brian Andrews

      So what was Burisma buying by paying Hunter Biden $83k a month?

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        Pat Riot

        Putting a famous person on their Board for bragging rights in exchange for 0.000012% of their revenues.

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          John from FL

          Hunter Biden wasn't famous. Joe Biden was famous, and potentially influential. Hunter is shady; Joe is clean.

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          Brian Andrews

          Weird that Hunter's business partner (s) didn't see that way.

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            Pat Riot

            What way did he see it?

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    Kevin Durant?

    “Vitaliy Kasko, Shokin’s former deputy, told Bloomberg News last May that any investigations into Burisma’s owner Mykola Zlochevsky were “shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015,” well before Vice President Biden put the squeeze on Poroshenko in early 2016.”
    ———————————
    Perhaps the problem with the Ukrainian justice system is that they don’t use paper

    Normally you have hundreds of pages of documents, court filings, allegations, sentences, words, etc

    In this case we have “Vitaliy Kasko assures us” which seems a bit shifty, at best

    But hey, at least we got rid of the corrupt guy and replaced him with “somebody solid”, Lutsenko.....who was also corrupt

    I don’t know about you guys but I am plumb out of questions

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    JohnF

    This whole episode is one of the most disturbing examples of how information can be distorted in our current media environment. There is now a significant slice of the American populace that truly believes that Joe Biden had a Ukrainian Prosecutor fired to protect his son from investigation. They will go to their graves believing this, despite the existence of a significant amount of evidence that contradicts this false narrative. They also now believe that "influence peddling" (or, as in Hunter Biden's case, selling the promise of influence without actually having the means to deliver) equals "corruption".

    Meanwhile, Ukraine has actual problems that it needs to address. Real Corruption occurs when you look for justice for something, but the Police won't arrest someone, investigate, or even show up when called, because they've been paid to look the other way. Real Corruption occurs when Prosecutors won't pursue a case (or pursue it improperly) because they've been bribed. Real Corruption occurs when Government funds are misappropriated by politicians and their associates, either directly, or indirectly through self-dealing and the awarding of government contracts.

    Shokin's investigation/non-investigation into the owner of the company that hired Hunter Biden was a relatively minor offence in the midst of many others. His department also failed to prosecute much more prominent members of the former Yanukovych Government. More directly, his department actually blocked a potential prosecution of Burisma's owner in the UK by sending a statement to his UK defense lawyers stating that he was not being investigated for anything in Ukraine. Shokin's department also blocked the investigation of two of his prosecutors, who were discovered to have more than $500K in their apartments, along with diamonds and other valuables, and were accused of extorting monthly payments from a local waste management company. Meanwhile, he WAS fully invested in the prosecution of a reform-minded prosecutor, who had complained about some of the activities/non-activities of the Prosecutor-General's office. There are plenty of other examples, but you get the idea. In short, Shokin was someone who was seriously in need of firing, and it had very little (if anything) to do with Hunter Biden.

    Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's new President, has real problems that he has to deal with. His Government recently fired more than 500 prosecutors and his new Prosecutor-General is currently auditing past investigations. He still has to work with an entrenched old guard that was established when Ukraine was still a Soviet Republic that is doing everything it can to slow progress towards anti-corruption efforts. In his spare time, he is trying to recover more than $100B that was looted from Ukraine by Viktor Yanukovych and his government.

    Hunter Biden is the least of his problems.

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      Pat Riot

      That's what is terrible about this whole episode. Whereas Trump hasn't managed to kill any Americans yet, he's certainly killed a lot of freedom-fighting Ukrainians by his actions, damaging the country's critical fight against corruption. And if Ukraine falls to Russia and the Soviet Union re-forms, that will eventually kill a lot of Americans but "eventually" is safely after the November election so Republicans don't care.

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        Brian Andrews

        This is nonsense. The aid in question was prospective.

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    Azlefty

    Useful information presented in a useful way, thanks. The misdirection is probably a lot easier because Ukrainian names sound unfamiliar to most Americans, so it's difficult to remember who is whom. The letter was signed by Republican Senators Portman and Johnson. Did you seek any comment from them about this or have they made any comments about it elsewhere?

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