I'm leaving here in 6 hours and if the prosecutor isn't fired, you're not getting the billion dollars-------Sure seems that he had the power Eldorado.
Reminds me of my wife's niece who at nine years old point blank refused to accept Raton Pérez, Colombia's equivalent to Santa is not real. She was past all logic and point blank ready to gaslight the world. Manifesting her own reality. Cute in a nine year old girl, an adult man should be put in the village stocks.
You really think Biden, or any of his big donors, gives a shit about you or your volunteer group? As long as he has the big Dem donors he will never step down.
John Solomon inadvertently detonated the House impeachment case https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/john-solomon-inadvertently-detonated-house-impeachment-case The right-wing scandal machine relies on confusing the public with references to an obscure cast of characters and a plethora of minute details which they claim prove their political foes engaged in nefarious deeds. But when you dig through the labyrinthine particulars they rail about, you often find that the core of their story is total nonsense. Here is one such case. The right-wing conspiracy theory that Joe Biden, as vice president, pushed for Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor in order to aid his son Hunter’s business dealings is a pillar of House Republicans’ push to impeach him. Even some GOP members of Congress have pointed out there is “no evidence” to support this long-debunked narrative. But the hypothesis is further demolished by a document published last month by — of all people — the fabulist John Solomon, which indisputably confirms that at the time of that meeting, it was the policy of the U.S. government to seek that prosecutor’s removal. The right has baselessly claimed for years that when Biden told Ukraine’s leaders during a December 2015 visit that the U.S. would not release $1 billion in loan guarantees unless they fired Viktor Shokin, the country’s prosecutor general, he was acting to benefit Hunter by halting Shokin’s purported probe of Burisma Holdings, on whose board Hunter served. Solomon, a former Fox News contributor and Washington Times editor, played a key role in concocting this pseudoscandal, alongside Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Fox News host Sean Hannity, and others, as they sought to damage Biden’s 2020 presidential run. Their allegations were nonsense: Biden was carrying out U.S. policy, Shokin had been widely faulted by Western governments for failing to prosecute corruption, and his Burisma probe had stalled, as detailed in contemporaneous news reports and sworn testimony during then-President Donald Trump’s first impeachment. But House Republicans have revived the conspiracy theory as the core of their Biden impeachment plan. The GOP’s narrative has now taken another hit: A briefing memo published by Solomon last month documents that it was U.S. policy to seek Shokin’s removal at that time. The memo, generated by the State Department for Biden in preparation for his meeting with then-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko during a December 7-8, 2015, Ukraine trip reads in part under the heading “Background” (emphasis added): Unity and Reforms: With local elections in the rear-view mirror and an economy that while still in difficulty, seems to have moved back from the precipice, the time is ripe for President Poroshenko to reanimate his reform agenda. You should recommend that he give a state of the nation speech to the Rada in which he reenergizes that effort and rolls out new proposed reforms. There is wide agreement that anti-corruption must be at the top of this list, and that reforms must include an overhaul of the Prosecutor General’s Office including removal of Prosecutor General Shokin, who is widely regarded as an obstacle to fighting corruption, if not a source of the problem. Under “Talking Points,” the document states that “anti-corruption efforts … will also require changing the Prosecutor General who is damaging your credibility and obstructing the fight against corruption.” Similar language appears in a separate memo for Biden’s meeting with then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, which Solomon also published. Solomon, naturally, is unwilling to accept that these documents blow a hole in the narrative he and his allies have pushed for years. He stressed in an August 22 article for his Just The News site and on Fox that night that the same memos call for Biden to sign the $1 billion loan guarantee rather than using it as leverage to force Shokin’s firing. “The Biden White House knew that this Shokin investigation posed a political threat to the family, a personal threat to Joe Biden’s son's company, the company paying him a million dollars a year,” Solomon told Hannity. “And it’s in that moment when all this is happening that Joe Biden flips the switch and goes from the recommendation giving the billion dollars to you’re not getting the billion dollars until you fire Shokin and son of a b, they fire Shokin.” The reason for Biden’s divergence from the plan described in the memos is unclear. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler reported Friday that a source told him Biden had “called an audible” during the plane trip to Ukraine, but that “by the time Biden landed in Kyiv, four people with direct knowledge told The Fact Checker, the Obama White House was firmly on board with the plan.” ”Others,” Kessler wrote, “recall a more disciplined policy process preceding the trip that led to consensus on linking the firing to the loan.” Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 2015, and Victoria Nuland, who oversaw European affairs at the State Department at the time, both testified in 2020 congressional depositions that they recalled that conditioning the assistance on firing Shokin had been “U.S. government policy” developed through an interagency process. Pyatt further testified that the policy had already been conveyed to Ukrainian officials at the time of the trip. Pyatt also downplayed the importance of the memos’ recommendations, saying they had been “written by a desk officer” and that in his experience, high-ranking officials would never “take a State Department product like this and sort of use that as their script.” Nuland, meanwhile, stated that the interagency community had at the time been “dissatisfied that past investigations of Burisma had not been brought to conclusion” and thought that Shokin’s removal “would be counter to Burisma's interests.” That’s consistent with last month’s testimony from Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner and fellow Burisma board member, who told congressional investigators he had not been aware of any Shokin investigation into the company and that Shokin’s firing “was bad for Burisma because he was under control.” But ultimately, the tick-tock of how Biden came to use the particular strategy of leveraging the loan guarantee is fundamentally irrelevant: The memos show that Biden, in seeking Shokin’s firing, was acting consistent with U.S. policy rather than freelancing to help his son.
Despite Biden’s claim, Europeans WEREN’T trying to oust Ukraine prosecutor targeting Hunter’s firm The European Commission praised Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin for his efforts to fight corruption in a December 2015 progress report published nine days after then-VP Joe Biden demanded his ouster. The report flies in the face of Biden’s claims that the European Union joined his demands that Shokin be removed for being corrupt and obstructing anti-corruption reforms. In fact, the Dec. 18, 2015, progress report, obtained by the New York Post, says that the European Union was satisfied that Ukraine had achieved “noteworthy” progress, including in “preventing and fighting corruption,” and thus was eligible for visa-free travel in Europe. The European Commission noted that Shokin had just appointed the head of a specialized anti-corruption prosecution office, which it described as “an indispensable component of an effective and independent institutional framework for combating high-level corruption.” The new office would help the newly established National Anti-Corruption Bureau combat corruption, the report noted, and urged Ukrainian leadership to ensure that both bodies were “fully operational” by the first quarter of 2016. But Shokin was gone by March 29, 2016, forced out by Biden’s threats to then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that he would withhold $1 billion in US aid unless the prosecutor general was fired. “Based on these commitments, the anti-corruption benchmark is deemed to have been achieved,” the European Commission report found. “The progress noted in the fifth report on anti-corruption policies, particularly the legislative and institutional progress, has continued.” At the same time, the EU commissioner for migration, home affairs and citizenship issued a public statement on Dec. 18, 2015, praising Shokin and other officials for making “enormous progress” on reform, according to a report by John Solomon from Just the News. “I congratulate the Ukrainian leadership on the progress made towards completing the reform process which will bring important benefits to the citizens of Ukraine in the future,” then-EU Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said. “The hard work towards achieving this significant goal has paid off. Now it is important to keep upholding all the standards.” Biden boasted in 2018 about the pressure campaign he had waged to force the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin, who had been in the job just 13 months, having been appointed as a broom one year after the Maidan revolution ousted the previous corrupt Russia-aligned government. “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” said Biden, referring to a $1 billion US loan guarantee, during an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.” Fired Ukraine prosecutor Viktor Shokin says he believes Bidens were bribed At the time he was removed, Shokin was investigating the corrupt energy company Burisma that was paying Biden’s son Hunter $1 million a year to sit on its board. Shokin’s office issued a warrant to seize all of Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky’s properties in Kyiv on Feb. 2, 2016. Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer testified last month to the House Oversight Committee that Burisma added Hunter to its board so that “people would be intimidated to mess with them … legally.” Shokin was “a threat” to Burisma, Archer told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “He ended up seizing assets of [Zlochevsky] — a house, some cars, a couple properties. And [Zlochevsky] actually never went back to Ukraine after Shokin seized all of his assets.” In an interview with The Post last month from his home in Kyiv, Shokin denied that he was corrupt and said he was fired illegally. He accuses Biden of “interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine” by forcing his removal and described the then-vice president’s threat to withhold US aid as “blackmail.” Shokin points out that, seven years after his ouster, neither Biden nor anyone else has produced evidence of corruption or wrongdoing by him. The European Commission’s praise for Ukraine’s progress on anti-corruption reform during Shokin’s tenure echoes internal State Department documents published by Just the News. A task force of State, Treasury and Justice Department experts had recommended in October 2015 that Ukraine should receive $1 billion in US loan guarantees when Biden traveled to Kyiv in December 2015, because the country had made adequate progress in fighting corruption, Solomon reported last month. The State Department memos included a personal letter from top US official Victoria Nuland to Shokin telling him that Secretary of State John Kerry was “impressed” with Shokin’s progress. But Biden, Nuland and others later claimed that the then-VP was simply carrying out official US policy and that European officials agreed that Shokin was corrupt and needed to be removed. “It was a policy that was coordinated tightly with the Europeans, with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank. But not only did we not see progress, we saw the [Prosecutor General’s Office] go backwards in this period,” Nuland, now Biden’s undersecretary of state, told the Senate Homeland Security and Accountability Committee in 2020. Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, told the Wall Street Journal in 2019, “Everyone in the Western community wanted Shokin sacked … The whole G-7, the IMF, the EBRD [the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development], everybody was united that Shokin must go, and the spokesman for this was Joe Biden.” However, none of the European bodies cited ever called specifically for Shokin’s removal or even mentioned his name. Instead, two months after Biden’s pressure campaign began, bodies such as the IMF issued statements generically criticizing Ukraine’s “slow progress” in fighting corruption. Meanwhile, Solomon reports that another influential international body was singing the praises of Ukraine’s corruption-busting reforms during Shokin’s tenure. In an Aug. 19, 2015, report, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace singled out Shokin’s office as among the most active on reforms. “Ukraine has adopted a package of anticorruption laws and established a set of institutions to fight corruption,” said Carnegie’s Ukraine Reform Monitor report. “The general prosecutor’s office has been the agency most active in this agenda.
Except Shokin wasn't investigating Burisma and Biden didn't have the authority to decide these things. Now post proof.