Fired Ukraine prosecutor Viktor Shokin says he believes Bidens were bribed
WASHINGTON — Former Ukraine prosecutor general Viktor Shokin says in a new interview set to air Saturday night that he believes — but lacks direct evidence — that President Biden and his son Hunter received bribes in exchange for forcing him out of office in early 2016.
“I do not want to deal in unproven facts, but my firm personal conviction is that, yes, this was the case. They were being bribed,” Shokin told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade in an excerpt of the interview released Friday.
“And the fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in US money in exchange for my dismissal, my firing, isn’t that alone a case of corruption?” added the former top law enforcement officer in Kyiv.
Shokin is a central figure in the controversy over alleged Biden family influence-peddling, which could morph into a House impeachment inquiry as early as next month.
The former prosecutor is rarely seen in Western media and his perceived credibility — or lack thereof — could dramatically shape efforts to impeach and remove the president from office.
Shokin was dismissed by a vote of Ukraine’s parliament in March 2016 following intense pressure from then-Vice President Joe Biden.
His office had been investigating Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of natural gas company Burisma Holdings, which paid then-second son Hunter Biden up to $1 million per year as a member of the company’s board beginning in April 2014.
Biden publicly claimed credit for forcing out Shokin by threatening to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees.
“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden said at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
An FBI informant file released publicly last month said that Zlochevsky claimed in 2016 that he was “coerced” into paying $5 million apiece in bribes to Joe and Hunter Biden in exchange for Shokin’s ouster.
Congressional Republicans are demanding to know what the FBI and Delaware US Attorney David Weiss’ office did to investigate after receiving that information in June 2020.
In a second clip of Kilmeade’s interview with Shokin, the former prosecutor claimed that Joe Biden was responsible for Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which occurred in early 2014, before Hunter Biden joined Burisma.
“Everybody knows that it was because of Joe Biden’s actions that Russia was able to claim Crimea without firing a single shot, which of course eventually led to a full-scale war that is currently underway,” Shokin said.
The full explanation of Shokin’s claim was not immediately clear.
Biden did play a significant role in the Obama administration’s early efforts to “reset” relations with the Kremlin, but his focus on Ukraine grew after the annexation of Crimea.
Democrats say that investigations of Biden’s alleged role in his family’s foreign business dealings amount to a political smear and impeached then-President Donald Trump in late 2019 for pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation of the Biden family.
Democratic impeachment managers argued that Trump was wrong to perceive corruption in Shokin’s ouster and said that his removal was a widely sought goal of the US and Western European countries.
They also argued that Shokin was not actively investigating Burisma when he was fired.
However, in the past few weeks, there have been significant developments in the storyline.
This week, purported internal Obama-Biden administration emails published by Just the News indicate officials were surprised that Biden was pushing for Shokin’s ouster as a condition of US aid.
“Yikes. I don’t recall this coming up in our meeting with them on Tuesday,” National Security Council aide Eric Ciamarella reportedly wrote in a Jan. 21, 2016, email, adding that “we were super impressed with the group” from Shokin’s office that visited DC.
Former Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer, who also joined Burisma’s board in 2014, told the House Oversight Committee in an interview on July 31 that Burisma added Hunter to its board so that “people would be intimidated to mess with them … legally.”
Archer confirmed that Joe Biden attended an April 2015 dinner in Washington with Burisma board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi and said that Hunter stepped away from a December 2015 meeting in Dubai to call his father, joined by both Pozharskyi and Zlochevsky.
Archer said he was unfamiliar with any alleged bribes and speculated Zlochevsky may have been thinking of salaries paid to himself and Hunter Biden.
Archer told journalist Tucker Carlson in a subsequent interview that Shokin was a “threat” to the company and ran Zlochevsky out of Ukraine shortly before his removal.
“He was a threat. He ended up seizing assets of [Zlochevsky] — a house, some cars, a couple of properties. And Nikolai actually never went back to Ukraine after Shokin seized all of his assets,” Archer said.
Shokin’s office won a court order to seize Zlochevsky’s property on Feb. 2, 2016, the Kyiv Post reported at the time. Shokin was fired on March 29.
The elder Biden spoke on the phone four times in February and March 2016 with then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and once with Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk as he pushed for Shokin’s ouster.
Within Burisma, Archer said that executives told board members that Shokin was “already taken care of,” which he interpreted as meaning his threat was blunted.
“That was the narrative that was fed to the board,” Archer told Carlson. “We were told that [his ouster] was bad. We don’t want a new prosecutor, Shokin was taken care of.”
But Archer said it wasn’t possible to take such remarks at face value and that in retrospect he doubts they were the complete picture.
“This is not like, you know, checkers — it’s multiple dimensions here,” Archer said. “In this particular case, it’s pretty high stakes and pretty sophisticated.”
“It was kind of pounded into our heads” that Shokin’s ouster was not desired, Archer added. “Obviously as I look back, in the rearview it doesn’t paper as well.”
