The ex-Ukrainian prosecutor fired at Joe Biden’s urging, claiming the then-Vice President wanted him to stop investigating his son — even planning to take Hunter in for questioning.
Ukraine’s former chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin, 70, made the shocking claims in a little-known video from around 2019.
The video recently surfaced, along with new evidence supporting the theory that Joe had him fired to end an investigation into Burisma, the allegedly corrupt gas company on whose board Hunter served.
Shokin will repeat his claims Saturday night in an interview with Fox News.
“Joe Biden had reason to fear that all of this would ultimately come down to his son,” the ex-prosecutor said in the 2019 video.
Former Ukrainian Attorney General Viktor Shokin accuses Joe and Hunter Biden of ‘corruption’
Republicans have said Hunter’s entanglement with Burisma and its possible influence on Shokin’s firing are evidence of the Biden family’s influence peddling program.
“As we actively pursued the goal of clearing up this crime and finding out who was guilty of breaking Ukrainian laws in Burisma, we eventually found that the drivers recruited in May-June 2014 were likely involved. These were Devon Archer, Hunter Biden and others.”
“We planned to question Hunter Biden and Devon Archer (but) we didn’t have time,” Shokin said in another interview with Ukrainian news site Strana on May 6 of that year.
Burisma was accused of evading one billion Ukrainian hryvnia (up to $63 million) in taxes during Hunter’s time as a board member in 2014 and 2015, opening potential liabilities to those who signed the bills.
The firestorm of controversy over Joe’s intervention in Ukraine, reportedly on behalf of his son, has been called a “debunked conspiracy theory” by the left, but is now being championed by Republicans as grounds for impeaching the president.
Shokin’s claims that he investigated Hunter directly — and was shut down as a result — will add fuel to the fire.
Hunter and his friend Devon Archer both joined Burisma’s board in 2014 with a salary of $1 million a year. Devon assumed his role just days after meeting Joe at the White House.
Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky was at the time under investigation by Ukrainian, US and British authorities for corruptly obtaining gas permits and alleged fraud.
Joe publicly boasted about threatening to withhold $1 billion in US aid to Ukraine in 2015 until Shokin was fired, and was recorded talking on the phone with then-President Petro Poroshenko urging the Supreme Prosecutor’s firing.
Shokin was finally fired from the Public Prosecution Service in March 2016.
Stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post have dismissed the connection between the events, reporting that the Burisma investigation was “dormant” under Shokin’s thirteen-month stint as chief prosecutor, and that his resignation was pressured by the International Monetary Fund, European Union and US policies for its lackluster handling of prosecutions.
But records obtained by DailyMail.com show that Shokin opened and pursued cases against Zlochevsky, seized his assets and even prosecuted his own staff for letting the oligarch sneak away to Cyprus with $23 million temporarily frozen by a British court.
Documents released this month show that top White House and State Department officials were “impressed” with his agency’s work as late as January 2016, while bureaucrats believed the Ukrainian government had made “sufficient progress had booked to justify a $1 billion loan in October 2015, shortly before Biden was due to take a $1 billion loan. threatened to withhold the money.
Shokin was promoted from his deputy role to Chief Prosecutor in February 2015.
His predecessor had botched an investigation into Burisma last year for failing to provide a British court with enough evidence to uphold a freeze on Zlochevsky’s assets.
In June 2015, Shokin launched an investigation into gas permits issued while Zlochevsky was environment minister, and another to root out alleged accomplices to the prosecutor’s office.
The following month, he met with the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, and his office issued a press release on the progress of the Zlochevsky investigation… in particular, the intensification of cooperation with the British in this direction.
Former Ukrainian Attorney General Viktor Shokin accuses Joe and Hunter Biden of ‘corruption’
In public statements, Pyatt denounced the endemic corruption within the prosecutor’s office, but did not call him by name.
Ukrainian news sites reported that “two cottages, two lots, a household of 922 square meters, a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a trailer” of Zlochevsky were seized in February 2015 at Sjokin’s insistence.
Shokin also publicly complained in October of that year about the release of Zlochevsky’s assets by the British court, and launched a joint investigation with British and European authorities, according to a report in the Kyiv Post.
“The depiction as ‘asleep’ has nothing to do with the reality of the facts,” Shokin denounced in his 2019 video.
“We moved forward, me and my colleagues, and we were about to reach the outcome of this case.”
He even pledged his claims in an affidavit filed in a European court in 2020.
“I was forced to leave because I was leading a massive corruption investigation into Bursima…and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,” he wrote.
‘In my conversations with Poroshenko at the time, he stressed that I should stop my investigation into Burisma.
“I refused to close this investigation. That is why I was forced to leave office, under direct and intense pressure from Joe Biden.”
On June 11, 2015, top State Department official Victoria Nuland, on behalf of then-Secretary of State John Kerry, replied to a letter from Shokin, saying that the Department was “impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government’.
“Continued reform of your office, law enforcement and judiciary will enable you to investigate and prosecute corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair and transparent manner,” Nuland wrote.
President Joe Biden addresses the Ukrainian Parliament in Kiev, Ukraine, in 2015
A task force of state, justice and finance ministries that reviewed the proposed $1 billion loan to Ukraine concluded in October 2015 that “Ukraine has made enough progress on its reform agenda to warrant a third guarantee,” according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. by website Just the News.
The review did not link the loan to Shokin’s firing, despite Joe’s later insistence that he be fired.
And National Security Council official Eric Ciaramella wrote in a Jan. 21, 2016 email that his team was “super impressed” with the staff at Shokin’s office after a two-hour meeting with them.
But even though Shokin’s Burisma investigation was powerful, his other corruption investigations have been found to be flawed.
Public support for Ukraine’s chief justice wavered over his inability to prosecute criminals from the corrupt previous government, and protesters called for his resignation and that of others during street demonstrations in the capital.
His image was dealt a serious blow in July 2015 when his hard-nosed deputy David Sakvarelidze discovered that two of Shokin’s allies and employees had an apartment with bags of $400,000 in cash, 65 diamonds, copies of Shokin’s passports and a Kalashnikov rifle.
Sakvarelidze’s investigation was suspended and he was removed from his job, according to a 2019 report by the Independent.
As of late 2015, Joe has stepped up his own efforts to take down Shokin. In the eight days before his eventual resignation in March 2016, Biden called Poroshenko four times to make clear the threat that help would not come without his resignation, his former aides told the LA Times.
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in January 2018, Joe boasted that he had told Poroshenko at the time, “We’re not going to give you the billion dollars… If the prosecutor doesn’t get fired, you don’t get the money. and added, “Well, son of ab***h, he was fired.”
Despite the shady dealings of the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office, insider testimony makes it clear that Zlochevsky was concerned about the investigation.
In congressional testimony earlier this month, Hunter fellow Burisma board member Devon Archer said Burisma owner and its director Vadym Pozharskyi put “constant pressure” on Hunter to get help from “Washington DC” to finish Shokin’s investigation. to act.
Archer claimed to have witnessed Hunter and the Burisma owner call DC in December 2015 to discuss the matter.
“Shokin was considered a threat to the company,” Archer said during a subsequent interview with Tucker Carlson.
“Shokin took a close look at Burisma,” he said. ‘He was a threat. In the end he seized property of (Zlochevsky).’