The real quid pro quo: Joe Biden brags of Obama administration withholding $1B aid unless Ukraine fired prosecutor investigating Joe’s son Hunter

by Dr. Eowyn

Beginning in September 2019, House Democrats launched a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump over “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella‘s accusation that Trump had issued a quid pro quo, i.e., a threat, to withhold military aid to Ukraine as a pressure tactic to force the Ukrainian government to investigate allegations that Joe Biden’s son Hunter benefited financially from the firing of that same Ukrainian prosecutor.

Note: Quid pro quo is a Latin phrase which means an exchange of goods or services, in which one transfer is contingent upon the other; “a favor for a favor”.

President Trump did no such thing, as proven by the transcript of his phone call with Ukraine President Zelensky, which had been confirmed by Zelensky himself. See:

Nor is it improper for President Trump to ask the Ukrainian goverment to investigate possible corruption on the part of the Bidens. See “1998 US-Ukraine treaty on mutual assistance in criminal matters proves it’s another Democrat witch-hunt”.

Democrats have a predilection to psychological projection — accusing others of what something they themselves did or are doing.

It turns out that when he was Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden threatened Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko that if he didn’t fire Ukraine’s State Prosecutor Viktor Shokin — who was investigating the founder of natural gas company Burisma Holdings, where Joe’s son Hunter Biden had a lucrative role on the board — Ukraine would not get a billion dollar loan guarantee from the United States.

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Biden bragged about making that threat on January 23, 2018, on a panel at the Council on Foreign Relations panel.

Below is a video of Biden bragging about the quid pro quo, followed by the transcript of what he said.

Beginning at the 0:16 mark, the interviewer asks Biden:

“This [Trump] administration, unlike the [Obama] administration you worked in [as Vice President of the USA], decided to provide limited defense articles to Ukraine, do you think that was a wise decision and, more broadly, do you see any scope for any sort of a deal on eastern Ukraine?”

Biden replies (0:31 mark):

“The answer is yes, I think it was a wise decision. But then again, I was pushing that for two years before we left. So, and the reason is, I think, the more you upped the ante, the cost to Russia for their aggression, I mean as you all know this better than anybody, um, you know, the one big lie going on about Ukraine back in and and and the rest of Russia is that no Russian soldiers are engaged, they’re not dying, no body bags are coming home etc., because there’s overwhelming opposition on the part of the body politic and Russia for engagement in Ukraine in a military sense. Um, do I think the [inaudible] has potential to be solved, but it takes two things. One of those things is missing now, and that is I’m desperately concerned about the backsliding on the part of Kiev in terms of corruption. They made—I mean, I’ll give you one concrete example. I was—not I, but it just happened to be that was the assignment I got. I got all the good ones. And so I got Ukraine. And I remember going over, convincing our team, our leaders to—convincing that we should be providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from [President Petro] Poroshenko and from [Prime Minister Arseniy] Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.

So they said they had—they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president, the president said. I said, call him.

(Audience laughter)

I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars.I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. 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 bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

If YouTube takes down the video, you can watch it on the Wall Street Journalhere.

From Fox News, Oct. 2, 2019:

The fired prosecutor at the center of the Ukraine controversy said during a private interview with President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani earlier this year that he was told to back off an investigation involving a natural gas firm that was linked to Joe Biden’s son, according to details of that interview that were handed over to Congress by the State Department’s inspector general Wednesday.

Fox News obtained a copy of Giuliani’s notes from his January 2019 interview with fired Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin in which he claimed that his “investigations stopped out of fear of the United States.”

“Mr. Shokin attempted to continue the investigations but on or around June or July of 2015, the U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey R. Pyatt told him that the investigation has to be handled with white gloves, which according to Mr. Shokin, that implied do nothing,” the notes from the interview stated. The notes also claimed Shokin was told Biden had held up U.S. aid to Ukraine over the investigation.

Shokin was fired in April 2016, and his case was “closed by the current Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko,” according to the notes. Despite his claims, Shokin, on both sides of the Atlantic, had been widely accused of corruption.

~Eowyn

 

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