John Solomon is out with his big piece today on Joe Biden’s firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor in 2016, presenting contradictory evidence from multiple American officials on Biden’s reasons for having the prosecutor dismissed.
It’s a long semi-long article that you’ll need to read for yourself. But the bottom line is, at least to me, that after Biden used US aid money to incentivize the firing of Shokin, the prosecutor investigating his son’s company, multiple US officials began apologizing to Ukraine officials for all the “false” information from US officials:
“Burisma’s American legal representatives met with Ukrainian officials just days after Biden forced the firing of the country’s chief prosecutor and offered “an apology for dissemination of false information by U.S. representatives and public figures” about the Ukrainian prosecutors…”
In addition, Burisma’s American team offered to introduce Ukrainian prosecutors to Obama administration officials to make amends…
Enter Blue Star Strategies… (emphasis mine):
Burisma’s own accounting records show that it paid tens of thousands of dollars while Hunter Biden served on the board of an American lobbying and public relations firm, Blue Star Strategies, run by Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano, who both served in President Bill Clinton’s administration.
At the time, Blue Star worked in concert with an American criminal defense lawyer, John Buretta, who was hired by Burisma to help address the case in Ukraine. The case was settled in January 2017 for a few million dollars in fines for alleged tax issues.
On March 29, 2016, the day Shokin’s firing was announced, Buretta asked to speak with Yuriy Sevruk, the prosecutor named to temporarily replace Shokin, but was turned down, the memos show.
There’s a lot of names flying around and they’re about to become important to my point:
Blue Star, using the Ukrainian embassy worker it had hired, eventually scored a meeting with Sevruk on April 6, 2016, a week after Shokin’s firing. Buretta, Tramontano and Painter attended that meeting in Kiev, according to Blue Star’s memos.
Sevruk memorialized the meeting in a government memo that the general prosecutor’s office provided to me, stating that the three Americans offered an apology for the “false” narrative that had been provided by U.S. officials about Shokin being corrupt and inept.
“They realized that the information disseminated in the U.S. was incorrect and that they would facilitate my visit to the U.S. for the purpose of delivering the true information to the State Department management,” the memo stated.
So why are all these people apologizing to the Ukraine government for all of this false information related to Shokin’s firing if what Biden was saying is true?
Add to that Shokin’s own words indicating he was fired by Biden for looking into his son’s company…
In a newly sworn affidavit prepared for a European court, Shokin testified that when he was fired in March 2016, he was told the reason was that Biden was unhappy about the Burisma investigation. “The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,” Shokin testified.
“On several occasions President Poroshenko asked me to have a look at the case against Burisma and consider the possibility of winding down the investigative actions in respect of this company but I refused to close this investigation,” Shokin added.
I’m sure Shokin is telling the truth here, but since he’s the one that was fired, it’s not the strongest evidence to hear him say this.
But when coupled with the others apologizing to the Ukrainian government for all the ‘false’ information by public officials about Shokin, it suddenly becomes much stronger.
There’s a lot more to the article and you really need to read it for yourself, maybe a couple of times.