The Lies Of Joe Biden And The Truth About Viktor Shokin Are Two Different Things

Filed under: HUMINT

According to a report received by the FBI from a source that the Bureau deemed credible, but secondhand, then-vice president Joe Biden received a $5 million bribe from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, in 2015 or 2016.

HUMINT is always sketchy. (SEE: Steele Dossier.) The source, which has not been named, told the FBI what an unnamed Burisma executive had told them. Hearsay being admissible as an investigatory lead, if not as evidence in court, the information was duly recorded on a FD-1023 form.

“An FD-1023 form is used by FBI agents to record unverified reporting from confidential human sources,” Fox News explains. “The form is used to document information as told to an FBI agent, but recording that information does not validate or weigh it against other information known by the FBI.” It is not a judgment call.

In other words, we don’t know what else the FBI knows. We don’t know why the original source told the person who shared the information with the FBI. We know that the FBI believes the person who told them what the executive said, but we don’t know what the FBI thinks about that executive, his reliability, or his motives.

Perhaps Joe Biden took a bribe. Maybe an investigation into Hunter Biden will result in charges. Who knows whether impeachment will be an issue in 2024. Context is missing.

One thing we can be sure of, though. Viktor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor at the heart of the scandal, was fired by the Ukrainian Rada, not Joe Biden. Moreover, the proximate cause of Shokin’s dismissal had nothing to do with Burisma.

“I looked at them and said, 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money,’” Joe Biden has crowed about his December 2015 meeeting with then-president Petro Poroshenko in Kyiv. As a result, Biden suggested, Shokin “got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

This claim of personally responsibility is false. While Biden did communicate this Obama administration stance in December 2015, Shokin resigned at the end of March 2016 after weeks of intense media scrutiny in Ukraine.

According to Interfax Ukraine, Poroshenko finally asked Shokin to resign after 289 members of the 450-seat Rada voted on a motion to dismiss the prosecutor. That motion took place the day after hundreds of protesters turned out in Kyiv to demand Shokin’s resignation.

Matters boiled over during February when a deputy prosecutor named Vitaliy Kasko resigned in protest over Shokin’s alleged intererence in his own corruption investigations.

Kasko further claimed that Shokin had made his Prosecutor General’s Office (PGO) “a tool of political intimidation and of money-making … a hindrance to the reform of the criminal justice system as a whole, a hotbed of corruption, a political pressure tool and one of the key obstacles to foreign investments to Ukraine.”

Discontent with Shokin’s PGO leadership was widespread. He was accused of slow-walking important corruption cases. The US Department of State wanted him removed. European Union officials also considered Shokin a hindrance to transparency and anti-corruption efforts.

Shokin’s final undoing began when he charged the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a nongovernmental organization that was highly critical of his performance in office, with “embezzlement and misappropriation of funds” provided by the United States government for criminal justice reform.

Ukraine’s government forced Shokin to retire because his actions were so dubious. Joe Biden was never more than a White House messenger in that story.

Did Joe Biden take a bribe from Burisma? Maybe. If so, then it is a case of for American courts and Congress to consider — and it is a separate question from why Shokin resigned.

If we ask: “Did Joe Biden act corruptly when he told Poroshenko to fire Shokin?” The realistic answer is probably not. He was communicating a policy that all the relevant federal departments of government seem to have agreed upon, that agreed with European allies.

If Biden did accept a bribe, then his actions in Kyiv are certainly tainted. However, proving that a $5 million bribe motivated Biden’s words to Poroshenko seems like a more difficult prosecutorial task than if Biden had stood alone in opposition against the Department of State, White House, the EU, and Ukrainian anti-corruption activists. (Readers with law degrees are invited to correct me if I am wrong.)

It is entirely possible that Biden accepted money — and also entirely possible that he will get away with it.

Ukraine was a deeply corrupt country in 2016 and remains so today. There had been some good news until 2022. According to Transparency.org, “Ukraine is one of few significant improvers” on their Corruption Perception Index since 2013, they say, rising eight points by taking “important steps to improve oversight and accountability.”

The strengthening of state institutions and functions vulnerable to corruption has been another vital factor in the country’s progress: research shows that interference in the judiciary by oligarchs and other vested interests was one of the key corruption risks before the war.

A public transparency campaign, “everyone sees everything,” as well as new reporting mechanisms and a system of anti-corruption offices, has been created, with these efforts continuing even in wartime.

The counter-argument, of course, is that this is all just the western way of rules-based corruption replacing the Russian way of mafia-rules corruption, and that American anti-corruption money is just a different form of corruption.

Perhaps that is true. The reader is free to think so. It still doesn’t place responsibility for the end of Viktor Shokin’s prosecutorial career with Joe Biden.

Rather than bragging about his real accomplishments, I suspect that Joe Biden was embellishing them in Ukraine, and that this may or may not be related to general cognitive decline in an 80-year-old man.

“Joe Biden recently told Marines stationed in Japan that his son Beau died in the Iraq war—an incorrect statement that the president has puzzlingly made several times in the past,” the Daily Beast, hardly a right wing website, recently acknowledged.

In video obtained by the New York Post, Biden repeated this claim to a community college crowd in North Carolina during May. It is at least the third time he has been observed telling people that his son Beau died in Iraq when in fact his son died of cancer in Maryland.

Americans get this. According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll six weeks ago, only a third of Americans think that Biden has the mental acuity needed to remain president for another term. Whether deliberate or through dementia, the lies stand out.

But in the end it will be Americans who decide what to do about that, and they will do it here in America, not Ukraine, because of what is happening in America, not Ukraine.