Did Joe Biden Abuse His Power as Vice President to Shield His Son From Legal Scrutiny?
No.
In the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses on Monday, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida is running a television ad targeting Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden in the Des Moines media market.
Introducing himself over a dramatic piano riff as “one of the jurors in the U.S. Senate,” Scott argues the “real story” of the impeachment trial is “the corruption Joe Biden got away with.”
“Vice President Biden threatened a foreign country,” Scott continues, “and forced them to fire a prosecutor who was investigating a company paying his son $83,000 a month.”
Scott is far from the only Republican to make this claim. Sen. Ted Cruz argued last month that as vice president, Biden “bragged publicly about withholding $1 billion in aid until Ukraine fired the prosecutor investigating Burisma, the company paying his son $1mm/yr.” Pam Bondi, a member of President Trump’s impeachment team, made a similar case during the trial this week. The White House itself promoted a video of Joe Biden speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations event in 2018, saying the former vice president “threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless a prosecutor was fired.”
So is it true? Did Vice President Biden “threaten to withhold aid to Ukraine unless a prosecutor was fired?”
Yes, but not in the insidious manner Scott, Cruz, and the White House are hinting at.
The clip these Republicans reference shows Biden recalling a time when he, at the direction of the White House, threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees from Ukraine unless then-President Petro Poroshenko would “take action” against a state prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. “I said, ‘we’re leaving in six hours,’” Biden recounted of his meeting with Poroshenko. “‘If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well son of a bitch, he got fired! And they put in place someone who was solid.”
Because that prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was supposed to be investigating a handful of corruption cases, including one involving Burisma Holdings—a Ukrainian energy company on whose board Vice President Biden’s son Hunter sat—the aforementioned Republicans are trying to make the case that the elder Biden used his post to intervene and protect his kid from criminal exposure.
But in reality, the Obama White House, with the support of many Western nations, pressured Ukraine to remove Shokin because he was failing to investigate corruption, not because he was looking into Burisma. Vitaliy Kasko, Shokin’s former deputy, told Bloomberg News last May that any investigations into Burisma’s owner Mykola Zlochevsky were “shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015,” well before Vice President Biden put the squeeze on Poroshenko in early 2016. “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky,” Kasko added.
Republicans in Congress didn’t make a stink about this move at the time. In fact, in February 2016, with concerns of Shokin’s own corruption growing, several Republicans signed a letter encouraging further “reforms” to the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office. “We similarly urge you to press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General's office and judiciary,” a bipartisan letter to Poroshenko from Sens. Portman, Durbin, Shaheen, Johnson, Kirk, Blumenthal, Murphy, and Brown read.
Hunter Biden getting a cushy job on the board of Burisma—despite having little to no experience in the energy industry—is certainly an example of nepotism at its worst. But based on publicly available evidence, claims that Joe Biden abused his power as vice president to shield his son from scrutiny are misleading.
Photo of Hunter Biden and Vice President Joe Biden by Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA.
If you have a claim you would like to see us fact check, please send us an email at factcheck@thedispatch.com. If you would like to suggest a correction to this piece or any other Dispatch article, please email corrections@thedispatch.com
This whole episode is one of the most disturbing examples of how information can be distorted in our current media environment. There is now a significant slice of the American populace that truly believes that Joe Biden had a Ukrainian Prosecutor fired to protect his son from investigation. They will go to their graves believing this, despite the existence of a significant amount of evidence that contradicts this false narrative. They also now believe that "influence peddling" (or, as in Hunter Biden's case, selling the promise of influence without actually having the means to deliver) equals "corruption".
Meanwhile, Ukraine has actual problems that it needs to address. Real Corruption occurs when you look for justice for something, but the Police won't arrest someone, investigate, or even show up when called, because they've been paid to look the other way. Real Corruption occurs when Prosecutors won't pursue a case (or pursue it improperly) because they've been bribed. Real Corruption occurs when Government funds are misappropriated by politicians and their associates, either directly, or indirectly through self-dealing and the awarding of government contracts.
Shokin's investigation/non-investigation into the owner of the company that hired Hunter Biden was a relatively minor offence in the midst of many others. His department also failed to prosecute much more prominent members of the former Yanukovych Government. More directly, his department actually blocked a potential prosecution of Burisma's owner in the UK by sending a statement to his UK defense lawyers stating that he was not being investigated for anything in Ukraine. Shokin's department also blocked the investigation of two of his prosecutors, who were discovered to have more than $500K in their apartments, along with diamonds and other valuables, and were accused of extorting monthly payments from a local waste management company. Meanwhile, he WAS fully invested in the prosecution of a reform-minded prosecutor, who had complained about some of the activities/non-activities of the Prosecutor-General's office. There are plenty of other examples, but you get the idea. In short, Shokin was someone who was seriously in need of firing, and it had very little (if anything) to do with Hunter Biden.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's new President, has real problems that he has to deal with. His Government recently fired more than 500 prosecutors and his new Prosecutor-General is currently auditing past investigations. He still has to work with an entrenched old guard that was established when Ukraine was still a Soviet Republic that is doing everything it can to slow progress towards anti-corruption efforts. In his spare time, he is trying to recover more than $100B that was looted from Ukraine by Viktor Yanukovych and his government.
Hunter Biden is the least of his problems.
The fact that Biden was doing the exact *opposite* of what Republicans are alleging shows you what we're up against in this era of "alternative facts".
And the idea that Republicans are going after Biden's children in the context of the *actually corrupt* Trump children also tells you who is using lies more effectively this cycle.
The broader context is that Trump and his family's corruption is absurd and off the charts, and any other president's own party would have long abandoned him. Instead the Republicans are doubling-down and doubling-down again on Trump, and because of that they need to make up increasingly obvious lies about the other side in order to defend him.
But make no mistake, this is the new Republican playbook: for every awful thing Trump is caught doing, just say "Democrats did it too" regardless of what it even is. Like the victims of Trump University, there are millions who desperately don't want to find out they've been conned and that their dream was all a lie.