Fired Ukraine Prosecutor Files Federal Complaint Against Joe Biden, Demands Probe
Viktor Shokin calls for investigation of bribery allegations against ex-vice president
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Viktor Shokin, the fired Ukraine prosecutor who was forced out of his job due to pressure from Joe Biden, has filed a federal complaint against the former vice president, demanding a full investigation into allegations of bribery.
After he left office in 2017, Biden publically boasted about forcing the Ukrainian government to fire its top prosecutor while he was vice president and overseeing foreign interests in Ukraine.
During a meeting with foreign policy specialists, Biden made the remarks in which he bragged that he withheld U.S. aid from Ukraine to strong-arm them to fire Shokin.
Biden said he threatened then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Shokin.
Biden suggested during his talk that Barack Obama was in on the threat that would have sent the former Soviet republic toward insolvency.
In April last year, investigative reporter John Solomon revealed what Biden did not tell his audience - that had Shokin fired because he was investigating Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
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Now, Shokin has filed a criminal complaint with the state authorities, claiming former Biden strong-armed Kiev into firing him in order to stop the investigation into Hunter's Ukraine energy company, Burisma Holdings.
In the complaint Shokin sent to Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) on Tuesday, the former prosecutor requests that Biden be charged with “interference with the activities of a law enforcement officer.”
The document was obtained by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency, according to RT.
Shokin urged the SBI to kick-start a pre-trial investigation into the alleged crime committed by Biden, who he claims was illegally pressuring Ukrainian officials into ousting him from office while using a $1 billion loan guarantee as leverage.
Noting that Biden, in his official capacity as the second-in-command in the US political hierarchy, repeatedly visited Ukraine in late 2015 and early 2016 to persuade high-ranking officials to remove him, Shokin argued that “as a result, he curtailed an objective investigation criminal proceedings on the facts of unlawful activities of persons associated with the company Burisma Holdings Limited (Cyprus), including the son of the specified high-ranking official [Biden’s son Hunter, who sat on the company’s board from 2014 till 2019].”
Shokin specifically refers to the recently released documentary series ‘UkraineGate: Inconvenient facts’ by French investigative journalist Olivier Berruyer.
Berruyer doc challenges the Western media claims that the corruption investigation into Burisma was “dormant” at the time Biden was lobbying for Shokin’s dismissal.
Mr. Berruyer, the founder of the popular anti-corruption blog Les Crises, said that he collected documents that show that the investigation into the gas company was in full swing at the time.
Shokin’s own words to that effect have received only a passing mention, or no mention at all, in mainstream US media outlets, however.
In a recent interview with ABC News, Shokin said that his office was handling six investigations into Burisma at the time of his forced resignation.
However, ABC kept that part of the interview under wraps – leaving the American public essentially in the dark about the status of the probe.
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Meanwhile, President Donald Trump was impeached in the House of Representatives and is on trial in the Senate on charges of “abuse of power,” after Democrats accused him of pressuring Kiev into reviving the Burisma probe last summer by withholding US military aid.
Biden openly boasted at a 2018 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) event that in March 2016, he gave then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko a six-hour deadline to fire Shokin or he would withdraw $1 billion in US loan guarantees.
Poroshenko subsequently dismissed Shokin on April 3, 2016.
It was reported that a day after Yuriy Lutsenko was appointed new prosecutor general, Biden called Poroshenko to congratulate him and to announce that the US would greenlight the aid.
