LOOK AT THE DATE
Posted on 12/04/2022 8:31:12 PM PST by SeekAndFind
At a campaign rally in Iowa, President Donald Trump cited an unsubstantiated news report to revive a widely debunked false narrative about Joe Biden’s work in Ukraine on behalf of the Obama administration.
As we have reported more than once last year, Biden traveled to Kyiv as vice president and warned Ukraine’s then-president, Petro Poroshenko, that the U.S. would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees until Ukraine removed its prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, who was widely viewed as corrupt.
At the time, the international community and anti-corruption advocates in Ukraine were also calling for Shokin to be removed from office for his failure to aggressively prosecute corruption.
But Trump has repeatedly distorted the facts about Biden’s work in Ukraine to baselessly accuse his Democratic rival of seeking Shokin’s removal to help his son, Hunter, who at the time was a board member of a Ukraine gas company called Burisma. He left the board in 2019.
In Des Moines, Iowa, on Oct. 14, Trump cited “explosive documents” published earlier that day by the New York Post to revive his widely discredited claim that Biden “went to Ukraine and threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid if they did not fire the prosecutor that was investigating his son and the company that his son worked for.”
As we’ve written, there’s no evidence Hunter Biden was being investigated.
The president made this line of attack against Biden a central campaign theme last year — until a whistleblower last fall alleged Trump had pressured newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a July 25, 2019, phone call to investigate Burisma, Biden and his son, Hunter. The administration released a memo of the phone call that confirmed the whistleblower’s account, and a subsequent House investigation confirmed that the Trump administration withheld U.S. military assistance to Ukraine to pressure Zelensky to publicly announce that he would launch the investigations sought by Trump.
As a result, the president was impeached by the House in December for abusing his office and obstructing the House investigation.
Undeterred, the president at the Iowa rally cited unverified emails allegedly sent and received by Hunter Biden that had been obtained by the New York Post from Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, as evidence that “Joe Biden has been blatantly lying about his involvement in his son’s corrupt business dealings.”
But the Post story and Hunter Biden’s emails — which may or may not be authentic — don’t support Trump’s claims.
In one of several stories on Hunter Biden, the New York Post wrote about a “smoking-gun email” that it claims proves the Democratic presidential nominee helped his son and Burisma. The story is based on a photo of an email that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent to Hunter Biden to “thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.” We have no way to verify that the email is authentic.
The Biden campaign says “no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place” because it wasn’t on Biden’s schedule. Of course, that isn’t evidence a meeting didn’t occur — but the email (if authentic) isn’t evidence that a meeting did occur, either. The New York Post did not confirm that the meeting happened, and it’s unclear from the email if the meeting did occur.
“There was no meeting. Period. I was in all of the Vice President’s meetings that touched on Ukraine, and I’d never heard of this guy until now,” Mike Carpenter, who was Biden’s lead adviser for Ukraine at the time, said in a statement provided to us by the campaign. “This has all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.”
We asked the Biden campaign about the authenticity of the emails and the claim that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden, and it referred us to Hunter Biden’s attorney. We will update this story if we get a response.
Citing another email from that same story, Trump said that “the same Ukrainian energy executive even sent Hunter an email saying quote ‘we urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence.’ In other words, Hunter was being paid for access to his vice president father who was specifically put in charge of Ukraine and Russia.”
Trump is referring to a May 12, 2014, email Pozharskyi allegedly sent to Hunter Biden that asked for “advice on how you could use your influence” to help Burisma. Again, we don’t know if the email is authentic, but even so, the email isn’t evidence that Hunter Biden agreed to use his “influence” with his father to help Burisma. And it certainly isn’t evidence that Joe Biden did anything to help Burisma.
Another story by the New York Post published the same day included an April 13, 2014, memo purportedly written by Hunter Biden to one of his partners, Devon Archer. The New York Post says in the memo Hunter Biden “repeatedly mentioned ‘my guy’ while apparently referring to then-Vice President Joe Biden.”
The memo said: “The announcement of my guys [sic] upcoming travels should be characterized as part of our advice and thinking- but what he will say and do is out of our hands.” It was written about a week before Biden, as vice president, visited Kyiv, where he talked about anti-corruption efforts during a press conference with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk in the wake of the Ukrainian revolution.
Biden’s April 22, 2014, press conference came a few months after Viktor Yanukovych, the former pro-Russia president of Ukraine, fled to Russia during the revolution.
“Ukrainians have also made clear that after an era of staggering public theft — not debt, public theft — that they will no longer accept corruption from public officials,” Biden said at the press conference. “Your former leader had to run in hiding for fear that after everyone saw the excesses to which his theft had taken him and others. The fact of the matter is I’m of the view — and it’s presumptuous to ever tell another man what his country thinks — but I’m of the view that Ukrainians east, west, north and south are just sick and tired of the corruption.”
Under the new regime, Shokin became prosecutor general in early 2015. But he failed “to indict any major figures from the Yanukovych administration for corruption,” according to testimony that John E. Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under President George W. Bush, gave in March 2016 to a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“Ukraine has had a long line of prosecutors whose function has not been to enforce the law, but to perform the political function of selectively prosecuting political enemies and to hold out the threat of prosecution in order to secure political loyalty and compliance. Shokin was precisely that kind of prosecutor,” Keith Darden, an associate professor at American University’s School of International Service, told us in an email for a story last year. “He would open cases as a way of holding the threat of prosecution over a business, but he did not actually prosecute cases.”
Biden later publicly disclosed that on another trip to Kyiv he told Ukraine’s new leadership that Shokin needed to be removed, warning that the U.S. would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees until Shokin was replaced. (Biden did not say when he made the threat, but he addressed the Ukrainian Parliament in Kyiv on Dec. 9, 2015, and dangled the prospect of future U.S. aid if the country rid itself of the “cancer of corruption.”)
“I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Biden recalled in remarks at an event hosted in January 2018 by the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
Trump repeatedly cites Biden’s January 2018 remarks as evidence that the former vice president pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin because he was investigating Burisma.
But, as we said, the evidence shows Biden was carrying out U.S. policy, and the United States was not alone in pressuring Ukraine to fire Shokin.
In February 2016, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde threatened to withhold $40 billion unless Ukraine undertook “a substantial new effort” to fight corruption after the country’s economic minister and his team resigned to protest government corruption. That same month, a “reform-minded deputy prosecutor resigned, complaining that his efforts to address government corruption had been consistently stymied by his own prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin,” according to a Jan. 3, 2017, Congressional Research Service report.
“After President Poroshenko complained that Shokin was taking too long to clean up corruption even within the [Prosecutor General’s Office] itself, he asked for Shokin’s resignation,” the CRS report said. Shokin submitted his resignation in February 2016 and was removed a month later.
It’s important to note, too, that Trump is citing from unverified emails that were allegedly obtained in a bizarre way by his own lawyer. According to the Post, the emails were found on a laptop that had been abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store, and the shop owner turned it over to the FBI but before doing so he “made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello.”
As we documented earlier this year, Giuliani has visited Ukraine and worked with current and former officials there in an attempt to obtain information damaging to Biden.
More recently, we wrote that Giuliani had been working with Andriy Derkach, who has been identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a “pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian” who is “spreading claims about corruption … to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party.” Those were the words of National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina, who issued an “election threat update” on Aug. 7 that said: “Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden.”
This, of course, isn’t the first time Trump is using material obtained from questionable sources against a Democratic opponent.
As we wrote in 2016, then-candidate Trump used hacked materials released by WikiLeaks to repeatedly distort the facts about then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in the final days of the 2016 campaign. In that case, the Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, which is responsible for intelligence collection for the Russian military, hacked into computer servers of the Democratic National Committee and party officials and released the hacked material to WikiLeaks and others “to help President-elect Trump’s election chances,” the U.S. intelligence community said in 2017. A counterintelligence investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller resulted in multiple indictments against Russians and Russian companies.
Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that the GRU successfully hacked Burisma’s computers.
“The timing of the Russian campaign mirrors the G.R.U. hacks we saw in 2016 against the D.N.C. and [Clinton campaign chairman] John Podesta,” Oren Falkowitz, co-founder of Area 1, a security firm that discovered the hacking attempts, told the Times. “Once again, they are stealing email credentials, in what we can only assume is a repeat of Russian interference in the last election.”
We don’t know at this point how Giuliani obtained emails and documents that purportedly belong to Hunter Biden. But we do know that they don’t support Trump’s baseless accusations against Joe Biden.
Updated, Oct. 16: We added a comment from Mike Carpenter, who was Biden’s lead adviser for Ukraine.
“FactCheck’s” Fact Checking has been unsubstantiated and widely debunked
So they are denying something uncle joe already has admitted to?
RE: So they are denying something uncle joe already has admitted to?
These Biden apologosts do not deny that Joe admits to pushing for the firing of the prosecutor. However they say that the REASONS are not what most of Biden’s detractors claim.
Their excuse is Joe Biden pushed the then Ukrainian President to fire the prosecutor ( Viktor Shokin ) using the $1 Billion loan guarantee as leverage, NOT in order to save his son from investigation, but because he was concerned that the Prosecutor was not really going after corrupt politicians.
SEE HERE FOR INSTANCE:
TITLE: Fact check: Biden leveraged $1B in aid to Ukraine to oust corrupt prosecutor, not to help his son
[EXCERPT]
It’s true that Joe Biden leveraged $1 billion in aid to persuade Ukraine to oust its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in March 2016. But it wasn’t because Shokin was investigating Burisma. It was because Shokin wasn’t pursuing corruption among the country’s politicians.
As European and American diplomats pressed Ukraine to clean up its corruption, they focused on Shokin’s leadership of the Prosecutor General’s Office, which he took over in February 2015.
Mike Carpenter, who served as a foreign policy adviser to the then-vice president, told USA TODAY that Shokin “never went after any corrupt individuals at all” and “never prosecuted any high-profile cases of corruption.”
Charlie Kupchan, who was a special assistant to President Barack Obama and a senior director for European Affairs on the National Security Council, said anti-corruption efforts were “a big part of our diplomacy” with Ukraine, since “it was that corruption that allowed Russia to manipulate the country politically and economically.”
As a result, Biden leveraged $1 billion in aid as “a stick to move Ukraine forward,” Kupchan said. “He was acting alongside our European allies. Everybody was of a single mind that this prosecutor was not the right guy for the job.”
* * *
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Here’s the Truth, the IC and foreign policy advisers identified that Ukraine was dependent on Russia for Energy.
The Deepest and oldest Democrats started having meetings on
Legislation to fund Ukraine and provide them infrastructure and Energy that would not come from Russia. They packed the goodies and specifically tailored the Money (legislation) for Natural Gas consultants that could bring them this Energy Independence. The old guard Dems worked with Biden who Obama named as point man on Ukraine.
So, chosen Dem staffers, relatives, and Hunter was sent to Ukraine to get the money that the Dems funded, Ukraine funneled large parts of that back to Burisma (Hunter). To no one’s surprise, the Dems Huge aid package for Ukraine was a huge waste of money. After Burisma and the usual suspects took their money, nothing was really produced. Ukraine was still as dependent on Russia as before, but the US Debt as increased, as usual.
A US President or Vice President has never demanded a Foreign Prosecutor be fired before in History.
And before Ukraine took the bribe, the Ukraine whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella met with top Ukraine officials at the WH and asked them to allow the FBi to take over the Investigation of Hunter and Burisma. Ukraine did not agree to the Biden FBi solution, and weeks later, he goes on a plane with the promise of One Billion dollars in exchange for the firing of the Prosecutor. They were given six hours, or the Billion dollars offer would be withdrawn permanently.
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Their gaslight is running out of gas, and none too soon.
Why do you post these lies without adding some kind of rebuttal or barf alert?
Without a rebuttal you are just an extension of the fake news.
The assertion that the so called "fact check" folks claim that "Trump has repeatedly distorted"... is in itself an unsupported assertion by them.
Actually Trump has been proven 100% correct is his assertions about Hunter Biden's activities.
Are the Fact Checkers trying to soften up the blow to come as the explosive findings in the laptop hit the news?
Their credibility is approaching zero.
What false narrative? Biden admitted it! His admission is videoed.
RE: Why do you post these lies without adding some kind of rebuttal or barf alert?
I expect you to use your PERSONAL DISCERNMENT to determine whether or not they are true or false. I’m sure most FReepers are intelligent enough NOT to need a barf alert to know the difference.
From this article we learn that “baseless” means “true, and fully supported by evidence, but, which evidence we will suppress, and the people who try to reveal that evidence, we will destroy”. E.g. “Baseless claims of election fraud.”
There goes that word again, “Debunked”. Every time I hear that I know there is truth they are trying to hide.
Factcheck says Shokin was “widely viewed as corrupt”. That is a classic MSM weasel phrase, they take an assertion, and simply say “many believe”. We don’t know who the “many” people are who supposedly hold the view that Shokin was corrupt, or why they hold that view. They could as well say
“Joe Biden, who is widely viewed as the most incompetent and corrupt public official in the history of the world”....
“Joe Biden has been blatantly lying about his involvement in his son’s corrupt business dealings.”
But the Post story and Hunter Biden’s emails — which may or may not be authentic — don’t support Trump’s claims.”
THE LAPTOP SUPPORTS THESE CLAIMS, there is a voicemail from Joe to Hunter in which Joe says, regarding a NY Times article about Hunter’s business dealings, that “You’re in the clear”. This obviously supports Trump’s claim that Joe knew about Hunter’s business dealings. Could not be more clear. And they’re still denying the authenticity of the laptop!
Obviously, I know it’s garbage with or without a barf alert - that’s not the point.
The point is - without your rebuttal, or a barf alert, there is no difference between you and CNN. Zero. Zip. Nada. You are both spreading lies.
You can say after the fact you did it “to know what the other side is saying” or some such nonsense. We KNOW what the other side is saying. Everyone is inundated with fake news all day long - why would anyone need you to repeat it when it’s on every channel and every newspaper?
You say it’s for discussion - but do you discuss it? No, you just throw it out there without any commentary - you are no different than CNN.
If you think there’s some value in reading fake news lies for the umpteenth time, explain why you think that. You are just helping them with their distribution.
The fake news loves people like you - you help them reach audiences that they couldn’t otherwise reach.
RE: The point is - without your rebuttal, or a barf alert, there is no difference between you and CNN. Zero. Zip. Nada. You are both spreading lies.
I disagree with this. The point of posting this is for EVERYONE to post their rebuttals. You are welcome to post yours.
There is a WHALE of a difference between posting something and agreeing with what was posted.
If you think the so-called “fact-check” is wrong and filled with lies, feel free to tell us why. I will be happy to read them. But don’t shoot the messenger.
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