Ex-Ukrainian Prosecutor Sacked for Sniffing Out Biden Corruption Breaks Silence

Viktor Shokin, the former Ukrainian prosecutor Joe Biden allegedly had a direct hand in sacking in 2016 by threatening to withhold a $1 billion US loan guarantee to Kiev in his capacity as Barack Obama’s vice president, has given a new tell-all interview to US media on his side of the story.

"I have said repeatedly in my previous interviews that [former Ukrainian President Petro] Poroshenko fired me at the insistence of the then-Vice President Biden because I was investigating Burisma," Shokin said.

"[Poroshenko] understood and so did Vice President Biden, that had I continued to oversee the Burisma investigation, we would have found the facts about the corrupt activities that they were engaging in. That included both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer and others," the ex-prosecutor added, referring to the younger Biden's former business partner, who recently gave testimony to lawmakers on the Biden family’s alleged foreign business dealings in a vast pay-to-play influence peddling scheme during Joe Biden's tenure as VP.

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Shokin said his "firm personal conviction" is that the Biden family got "bribes" to keep Burisma out of trouble, with the pressure the vice president put on Kiev in 2016 related directly to these payments.

"They were being bribed. And the fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in US money in exchange for my dismissal, my firing – isn't that alone a case of corruption?" the former official said.

A White House spokesman dismissed Shokin's allegations as "lies" and "debunked" falsehoods and slammed the US outlet for giving him a platform to speak.

However, a growing collection of evidence, including Joe Biden's own recollection at a Council on Foreign Relations event in 2018, where he bragged about his intervention to have Shokin fired, seems to suggest otherwise.

"I went over for I guess the twelfth or thirteenth time to Kiev and I was supposed to announce that there’s another billion dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from [then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny] Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor and they didn't. So they were walking out to the press conference and I said 'nah we're not gonna give you the billion dollars.' They said ‘you have no authority, you're not the president.’ I said ‘call him.’ I said ‘I’m telling you you’re not getting the billion dollars.' I said 'you're not getting the billion and I’m gonna be leaving here in I think it was about six hours', I looked [at my watch] and said ‘I’m leaving in six hours, if the prosecutor’s not fired you’re not getting the money. Well son of a b*tch! He got fired, and they put in place someone who was solid," Biden recalled at the CFR event.

Biden’s comments were later corroborated by audio recordings created by Poroshenko’s former right hand man, Oleksandr Onyshchenko, who went public in 2020.

"Joe, I have a second positive news for you. Yesterday, I met with the General Prosecutor Shokin. And despite of the fact that we didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I specially asked him…to resign," Poroshenko told Biden in broken English in a 2016 call. "And as a finish of my meeting with him, he promised me to give me the statement on resignation. And one hour ago he bring me the written statement of his resignation," Poroshenko added.

"Great," Biden said.

"And this is my second step for keeping my promises," Poroshenko said. "I agree," Biden said.

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The alleged $1 billion quid-pro-quo became a scandal in the US in 2019 as Democratic leaders accused then-President Donald Trump of illegally pressuring then-newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky to restart the Biden-Burisma probe. The scandal ultimately culminated in Trump's impeachment, on "abuse of power" and "obstruction of Congress" charges, in late 2019. The Senate aquitted him in early 2020.

As for Joe Biden, he managed to coast to victory in the 2020 presidential race, with media and tech giants working to cover up reports on his alleged pay-to-play scandals until after the election. After the 2022 midterms, in which Republicans won a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, lawmakers began a series of probes into the Biden family’s finances and potentially illegal dealings with foreign businesses.

In July, an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower told investigators that Hunter Biden and his business associates received some $17 million from foreign business sources, including $7.3 million from Burisma, and that the agency had uncovered evidence supporting felony tax evasion charges against the president’s son.

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The same month, Republicans floated an impeachment inquiry over the Biden family’s "criminal behavior," with investigators also confirming that Hunter brought his father into calls with foreign businessmen.

This week, in the latest batch of damning evidence to emerge about the Biden family’s alleged Ukraine dealings, memos showed that Joe Biden did not act in concert with the US government when making his $1 billion loan guarantee threat, because Kiev at the time had "made sufficient progress on its reform agenda" to get the money. Furthermore senior officials in the Obama State Department were revealed to have sent Shokin a personal note saying they were "impressed" with his office's work, just months before his sacking.

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