Viktor Shokin is Full of Sh*t

Fox News lets the corrupt ex-prosecutor lie freely

Victor Shokin was a top Ukrainian prosecutor for all of 13 months. During that time, he never indicted a single major figure — not one oligarch, politico, or high-ranking official of any kind.

Not one, in a country that was supposed to be the most corrupt in Europe. How?

By just not doing his job, is how. “Lack of aggression was a description many would use for Shokin’s approach to the job” during his tenure, Oliver Carroll wrote for The Independent in 2019.

Two of the people interviewed for this article described the former chief prosecutor as “lazy”, and uninterested in real investigations. Others noted a penchant for bonding with oligarchs over vodka in the bathhouse.

“He wasn’t exactly highly professional,” said one source, a current Kiev-based prosecutor who asked to remain anonymous. “Shokin would always sign documents without really looking at them. On the other hand, he’d let us get on with our jobs, and was quite democratic, which we all appreciated.”

Another source said Shokin’s tenure as Ukraine’s general prosecutor was “no more, but no less corrupt” than what went before it.

But if we are to believe Shokin’s story on Fox News Friday night, he was in fact the most virtuous man in Ukraine, indeed the only honest man in the whole country, a bonafide Diogenes, and therefore a victim of unfair firing through the machinations of then-vice president Joe Biden.

Republicans will never get to Joe Biden through Viktor Shokin. They have already tried this. Donald Trump has tried this. Corrupt as the day is long, Shokin’s lies are simply too obvious, for American vice presidents have no power to make foreign policy.

In fact, other than breaking a tie in the US Senate, or replacing a US president who has been incapacitated in some way, American vice presidents have no constitutional powers of any kind — and that is in the United States.

Ukraine’s constitution awards no powers of any kind to foreign vice presidents. None. Zero. Shokin had more actual, real, not-imaginary power in Ukraine — not that he ever bothered to use it against corruption.

On the contrary, Shokin actively worked to stop at least one investigation — that of his own protégé.

“Mr Shokin had been appointed prosecutor-general of Ukraine in February 2015, but the discussions in Washington and EU capitals about pushing for his removal started as early as April after he failed to follow through on a burst of expected early anti-corruption moves,” a former US Treasury official told the Financial Times in 2019.

“I know how the idea to have Shokin fired came up, and it wasn't Biden,” the official said. “His direct involvement came late in the game.”

Of course, the official might be lying. He is not the only one telling this story, though, so then they must all be lying. Perhaps the Obama administration was the first in American history to give new powers to the vice president — and did it in secret, and now they are all lying. Maybe Biden went over the heads of multiple cabinet secretaries to get what he wanted and they are all covering up for him. Who knows, the Obama adminstration could turn out to have been a vast, sinister conspiracy to elevate Biden all along, and the Obama presidency was just a cover story.

If so, then there ought to be a paper trail and witnesses, not to mention a lot of irate Obama-Biden people willing to spill the beans. To date, Republicans have not found a single witness who claims that Biden went against the administration. No one has ever indicated that Biden was off the reservation on this matter.

No one except Shokin, that is, and he has never been to the White House. So even if his assertion was true, how would he know what was happening inside the Situation Room?

Russian spying? ESP? Secret talks with Obama?

In reality, Shokin was clashing with reformers in Ukraine well before the White House ever arrived at their policy. For despite all of his noise about Burisma, Shokin took over two different investigations into the company when he came into the office, but then never bothered to move forward with either of them.

To repeat: during his tenure, Shokin never indicted a single major figure, including Burisma executives, though he had ample opportunities to do so.

Consider Oleksandr Korniets, known as the so-called ‘Diamond Prosecutor’ because he was arrested with scores of cut diamonds in his house. Investigators also found $500,000 in cash and certificates of deposit worth Hr 800,000 (about $21,700) during the sting in 2015.

“The arrests triggered a scandal when evidence emerged that Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin and his deputies Volodymyr Huzyr and Yury Stolyarchuk were trying to pressure [the] investigators to halt the case against Korniyets and Shapakin,” the Lviv Post reported in July 2015. (Emphasis mine.)

Repeating: Viktor Shokin not only failed to prosecute anyone of note, he actually worked hardest of all to stymie corruption investigations into his own people.

“Though Shokin and Huzyr deny this, the latter had to resign on July 28 amid the public uproar,” Oleg Sukhov explains. “Korniyets and Shapakin are protégés of Shokin and Huzyr,” a source tells reporter Sukhov.

Shokin was therefore under strong public pressure to resign well before Biden ever got involved. His story is easy to debunk. There are abundant examples of the entire Obama administration hardening their stance against Shokin.

During September 2015, US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt “accused the country’s Prosecutor-General’s Office of obstructing efforts to combat corruption and shielding its own employees from graft investigations.”

“Since his appointment by Poroshenko in February, Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin has faced accusations of stalling high-profile corruption cases against allies of [Victor] Yanukovych,” Radio Free Europe explained.

The following month, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland “recommended that the National Anti-Corruption Bureau’s specially designated anti-corruption prosecutor be appointed as soon as possible in order to start investigating crimes” by circumventing Shokin’s office.

“The process of approving this special prosecutor has been marred by accusations of delays and accusations of corruption against Procurator General Viktor Shokin,” reporter Zenon Zawada elaborated in The Ukrainian Weekly.

During November 2015, the Ukrainian branch of Transparency International, an anti-corruption NGO, complained that “the country’s leadership and Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin were trying to turn anti-corruption bodies into their ‘puppets.’”

“Shokin has ignored demands by the E.U. and Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry to replace his members of the commission with independent representatives of civil society,” they said.

By this point the criticism of Shokin was coming from a whole chorus of voices.

“At the center of those whose integrity and credibility have been called into question is Ukraine’s Procurator General Viktor Shokin — an increasing target of criticism by high-ranking Western officials — after he resisted EU recommendations that he replace the four prosecutors he had appointed to a commission to establish a Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office,” Zawada reported in November 2015.

When the former head of Ukraine’s state security service Valentyn Nalyvaichenko visited DC later that month, he had “privately accused the {Ukrainian] president’s choice of prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, of stifling investigations, triggering a protracted feud between the two lawmen,” according to contemporary reporting from Politico.

Discontent with Shokin was not restricted to one party on Capitol Hill, as Republicans Senators Rob Portman, Mark Kirk, and Ron Johnson had all signed a bipartisan letter calling for Shokin to resign or be fired.

Thus, by the time Joe Biden arrived in Kyiv during December 2015, just about everyone on the planet was expecting him to say something to then-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko about the very obvious corruption of Viktor Shokin.

No one expected Biden to do otherwise. No one was defending the honor of Viktor Shokin in the White House.

Vitaliy Kasko worked for Shokin in the Prosecutor General’s office. He resigned in January 2016 after Shokin repeatedly refused to let him attend anticorruption meetings outside Ukraine.

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.”

Shokin’s final undoing began the next month 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.

Hundreds protested in Kyiv. The Ukrainian Rada voted no confidence in Shokin. Petro Poroshenko, a longtime friend and ally of Shokin, finally asked him to resign, which he ultimately did. The European Union was enthusiastic.

At that point, four months had elapsed since Biden’s visit. No one involved in Shokin’s firing mentioned Biden’s supposed role in it.

Later, during the Trump impeachment trial, State Department Ukraine expert George Kent testified that Shokin was “a corrupt prosecutor general . . . who had undermined a system of criminal investigation that we built with American money to build corruption cases” and “destroyed the entire ecosystem that we were trying to create” in Ukraine.

To be sure, Joe Biden’s family business is sketchy. No one can quite say what Hunter gave back to the Russian, Chinese, and yes, Ukrainian oligarchs who gave him loads of cash. That congressional investigation ought to continue, and if it results in Joe Biden being revealed as corrupt, then so be it.

However, the idea that Viktor Shokin was fired to protect Burisma from his own investigative efforts is risible. Shokin wasn’t investigating anyone — except, of course, for the Ukrainians who wanted him to enforce the laws transparently.

They are the ones who got Shokin fired. Not Joe Biden. Whatever Biden bragged to his friends back in Washington, in reality he had nothing to do with it. Shokin’s downfall was always about the Ukrainians taking out their own trash.

Fox News should stop trying to recycle garbage. If there is a case to be made against Biden (and that is a real possibility), this surely ain’t it.