Joe Biden famously bragged that while vice president, he forced the firing of Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. government aid from the financially strapped European country. Biden’s boast, however, now threatens his presidency because overwhelming evidence indicates the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, paid Hunter Biden millions to have his father deal with Shokin.
In response to this most serious of scandals, Biden and his Democrat and media backers are pushing the most ridiculous of narratives: Biden didn’t want Shokin fired for investigating Burisma, but for not investigating Burisma. Then-Vice President Biden was only executing American policy — a policy supported by our allies, you see? So neither Joe nor Hunter Biden did anything wrong, the party line goes.
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler has championed this syllogism since December 2019, but in his mid-July 2023 article “Here We Go Again: An Explosive Hunter Biden Laptop Email Needs Context,” the self-branded “fact” “checker” refreshed these talking points to dismiss the significance of a Nov. 2, 2015, email thread identified by congressional Republicans as further evidence of Biden family corruption.
That thread began with an email from Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden, fellow Burisma board member Devon Archer, and Biden’s Rosemont Seneca business partner Eric Schwerin, discussing a proposal from the lobbying firm Blue Star Strategies. In that email, the Burisma executive complained the Blue Star proposal failed to identify the “concrete tangible results that we set out to achieve in the
