Kelly Laco
Daily Mail
Fri, 25 Aug 2023 18:19 UTC – SOTT net
© UNIANFormer Ukraine Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin
Former Ukranian Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin is accusing Joe and Hunter Biden of ‘corruption’ – saying they accepted large money ‘bribes’ from Burisma and were behind his firing.
Shokin, who was ousted as Ukraine’s top prosecutor in 2016, made the accusations during excerpts of an upcoming explosive interview airing on Fox News. At the time of his firing, he was investigating oil company Burisma Holdings for corruption – when Hunter was serving on the firm’s board.
In the interview, Shokin says:
“I do not want to deal in unproven facts. But my firm personal conviction is that yes, this was the case. They were being bribed…The fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal – my firing – isn’t that alone a case of corruption?”
The full interview aired Saturday evening at 8 pm ET with Brian Kilmeade.
The White House is accusing Fox News of giving a ‘platform to lies’ by airing the interview.
White House spokesperson Ian Sams said:
“For years, these false claims have been debunked, and no matter how much air time Fox gives them, they will remain false. Fox is giving a platform for these lies to a former Ukrainian prosecutor general whose office his own deputy called ‘a hotbed of corruption’, drawing demands for reform not only from then-Vice President Biden but also from U.S. diplomats, international partners, and Republican Senators like Ron Johnson.”
In December 2015, then-Vice President Joe Biden delivered a speech to the Ukrainian Rada during which he touted his anti-corruption efforts in the country and urged an overhaul and reform of the office of the general prosecutor.
A few months later in March 2016, Joe Biden is alleged to have threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine if Shokin specifically was not fired for corruption – and he was shortly thereafter.
Years later, Biden actually bragged about his firing at a Council on Foreign Relations event in 2018. Biden said that he would withhold a billion dollars in U.S. aid if the Ukrainians did not agree to fire Shokin.
“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a b****. He got fired.”
Republicans have said Hunter’s Burisma entanglement and possible influence in Shokin’s firing is evidence of the Biden family’s influence peddling scheme.
As part of a larger investigation, they are seeking records revealing Joe Biden’s use of pseudonyms to discuss his activities related to Ukraine with his son Hunter during his time as vice president.
They specifically want an un-redacted document that indicates that then-Vice President Biden took a call with the president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, on May 27, 2016.
Republicans say the document was emailed to ‘Robert L. Peters’ which is ‘a pseudonym’ the House Oversight Committee has ‘identified as then Vice-President Biden,’ a letter obtained by DailyMail.com states.
Hunter Biden’s ex-business partner Archer testified before the House Oversight Committee earlier this month that Joe Biden’s ‘brand’ protected Burisma because ‘people would be intimidated to mess with them.’
Hunter’s presence on Burisma’s board and access to his father – then vice president – led to the company’s ‘longevity’ because they had the ‘capabilities to navigate D.C.,’ Archer said according to the transcript.
Hunter’s best friend and business associate sat with him on Burisma’s board beginning in 2014. They also started Rosemont Seneca Partners, an investment advisory firm, together.
He confirmed that Hunter put Joe on speakerphone 20 times during business meetings over a 10-year period, which was a ‘signal’ of ‘value,’ and Hunter used his dad as ‘defensive leverage.’
© Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty ImagesThen US Vice President Joe Biden addresses Ukraine Parliament in Kyiv, 2015
He also told lawmakers that Joe sat and had dinner in-person on at least two occasions with Hunter and his foreign business partners, who then wired money almost immediately after to Biden-affiliated companies.
During a dinner with Burisma executives at the Four Seasons in Dubai in December 2015, Hunter said he would be able to get ‘help from D.C.’ in order to relieve some ‘government pressure’ on the company. Archer testified that Burisma was ‘getting pressure’ and as a result, they ‘requested Hunter, you know, help them with some of that pressure.’
He said it was ‘government pressure’ from the ongoing Ukrainian investigation into the company at the time – led by top prosecutor Shokin.
However, Archer said:
“Shokin wasn’t specifically on my radar as being an individual that was — that was targeting him. But yes, there was constant pressure. And it was like it was like whack a mole in regards to the pressures that had to resolve.”
He said that the Burisma executives weren’t specific in asking directly ‘can the big guy help?’ Rather, they used the ‘amorphous’ term: ‘can we get help in D.C.?’
Archer understood that ‘D.C.’ meant Hunter’s influence based on his connection to his then-VP father.
“Well, I mean, he was a lobbyist and an expert and obviously he carried, you know, a very powerful name. So I think it was that’s what they were asking for.”
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Conflict in Ukraine perpetuated by private and corrupt interests linking Zelensky and the Bidens
Uriel Araujo
InfoBrics
Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00 UTC – SOTT net
With regards to the ongoing Israeli military campaign in Gaza, the point of Benjamin Netanyahu’s supposed personal and political interests in the perpetuation of the military occupation has been raised by several analysts and journalists. Marc Champion, for example, writing for Bloomberg, highlighted the fact that the Israeli Prime Minister is currently “fighting corruption charges in court” (it being implicit that it is of course usually harder to investigate and to condemn incumbent national leaders). Netanyahu, in addition, will “face a political reckoning over Oct. 7’s security failures as soon as the war in Gaza ends.”
Thus, writes Champion, “under cover of the country’s blinding rage and deep yearning for long-term security, Netanyahu is fighting to secure his own political survival.” Champion and other analysts may or may not be spot on, with regards to Netanyahu’s motivations and calculations. The point is that personal, private and business interests (sometimes even involving shady deals) may indeed shape, to some degree, foreign policy decisions. And the issue is more outstanding in Ukraine than perhaps anywhere else.
By October 2023, the European Union (EU) and the United States had made over $160 billion (and counting) in commitments to Ukraine (including tens of billions in arms – many of which ended up in black markets, by the way). One may recall that already in 2021 Amos Hochstein was especially appointed by US President Joe Biden as the US Senior Advisor for Energy Security, with a focus, back then, on reducing the “risks” Nord Stream 2 posed, from an American perspective. Today, the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 pipeline is gone (have been criminally exploded as it was), and Hochstein, when not busy threatening Lebanon with war, (“learn from Gaza“) is currently preoccupied with the seemingly lost cause of Saudi-Israel normalization. Volumes could be written on those issues, but let us focus here on Eastern Europe.
Back in 2021, I commented on how American geopolitical and geoeconomic interests, pertaining to selling its own (more expensive) liquefied natural gas to Europe, were inextricably linked with private interests, which included corruption scandals involving Biden’s own family and his aforementioned protégé Hochstein – who is a former member of Naftogaz’ supervisory board, this being the largest national oil and gas company in Ukraine, also involved in a number of scandals.
I’ve also written on the shady deals involving Ukrainian investment company Dragon Capital and the American multinational investment company BlackRock, as well as the evidence implicating the Democrat Party and the Bidens. In many of these episodes, Hunter Biden, the incumbent president’s son plays a role: his sexual scandals, the once ridiculed biolabs allegations, and many other accusations once deemed as mere “conspiracy theories” gained traction within the US media, were weaponized by the Republicans, and keep haunting the current American presidency to this day.
As I wrote before, in August 2021, a Ukrainian Parliament’ member denounced a corruption ring within the aforementioned Naftogaz: interestingly, his testimony included alleged leaked audio records of then US Vice President Biden offering the then Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko a billion dollars as part of a secret deal to dismiss the former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the business activities of Biden’s son in the country.
Considering all that, it would not be too far-fetched at all to apply to the Biden’s administration, the same reasoning Marc Champion applied (with or without merit in this case) to Netanyahu’s one: the Bidens certainly seem to have lots of business and personal reasons to desire the perpetuation of a conflict in Ukraine, from which American arms’s manufacturers also profit.
Taking this reasoning further, this “personal” angle becomes even more evident when it comes to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. We know that already in June 2022, Ukrainian Army Brigadier General Volodymyr Karpenko admitted his nation had lost almost 50% of all weapons and equipment it received, and we know much of it has been smuggled to criminal and terrorist groups, Ukraine being “a longtime hub of arms trafficking”, as John Hudson, writing for the Washington Post, once described it.
Ukraine is also an import transit destination for drugs such as heroin. It has the third highest criminality score of 33 countries in Europe. In today’s world, illicit trade plays of course a major role in the financing of terrorist and extremist networks globally, and far-right extremism is yet another huge problem that has been haunting the country since at least 2014. Such forces have certainly been a force to be reckoned with: on May 27, 2019, former neo-Fascist Dmytro Yarosh, then adviser to Valerii Zaluzhny, former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said that President Zelensky could “lose his life” and end up “hanging on a tree on Khreshchatyk” if he ever “betrayed” Ukrainian ultra-nationalists by negotiating an end to the civil war in Donbass.
Zelensky does have his personal motivations, including concerns about his own physical safety, for keeping the conflict with Russia going indefinitely. According to Seymour Hersh (Pulitzer winner winner) CIA sources, European leaders last year (from Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and the Czech Republic) were pressuring the Ukrainian leader “to find a way to end the war”, and they had “made it clear that ‘Zelensky can keep what he’s got – a villa in Italy and interests in offshore bank accounts – ‘if he works up a peace deal even if he’s got to be paid off, if it’s the only way to get a deal’.”
Taking all that into consideration, it is not far-fetched at all to describe the current aid Washington sends to Kyiv as being in part a major corruption scam that has a lot to do with leaders across the Atlantic trying to protect themselves and to secure their own private interests. This is not to deny of course the role American geopolitical interests (pertaining to NATO expansion) also played in the greater scheme of things. The point is that personal and electoral factors too should all be considered by analysts and journalists when trying to make sense of unwinnable conflicts being fueled.
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