Thursday, September 26, 2019

More on the Biden story

A journalist who wrote about the Biden story in 2015 complains:

I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine Years Ago. Then the Right-Wing Spin Machine Turned the Story Upside Down.

Trump and Fox News just have to say "black is white" and the low information dimwits of the Right nod along without reading another thing about it.

As for Biden "bragging" about what he did - yes, he did, and with no reference to his son at all.   I would have thought sensible people would have wondered - if this is so obviously corrupt and self serving, why would he brag about it?

The reporting is that the prosecutor was sacked (at several country's request) for not investigating corruption actively enough - the sacked prosecutor then claimed he was actively investigating Biden's company, but other journalists say this is self serving and wrong: nothing was happening.

And a new investigation has been started but is progressing slowly.   And what is the "corruption" alleged against the son anyway?  Making money from a sleazy company due to family connections - yeah, right, I can why that would upset Trump supporters (sarcasm.)

Update:  As David Graham explains:
To summarize, Biden threatened to withhold aid if the prosecutor wasn’t fired, and he was. Importantly, Biden was not freelancing, but was acting as a representative of President Barack Obama. There’s no evidence that Biden was helping his son. Shokin’s former deputy, who quit in frustration over his boss’s intransigence, told Bloomberg in May that the U.S. wasn’t pushing to drop probes of Burisma. “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky,” he said. “It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.”

In effect, Biden’s pressure to install a tougher prosecutor probably made it more likely, not less, that Burisma would be in the cross hairs. But since then, the Ukrainian government has not produced any evidence of wrongdoing by Burisma, and the current prosecutor general said in May there was none. A Ukrainian interior-minister official told the Daily Beast that though Ukraine has no evidence that either Biden broke the law, the government would investigate further if the U.S. formally requested it. Hunter Biden has left Burisma’s board.

Joe Biden says he did not discuss Burisma substantively with his son, though Hunter Biden told The New Yorker it came up briefly once: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’” Given Hunter Biden’s checkered past, and the political difficulty that he has caused his father, it’s doubtful he really knew what he was doing.

Hunter Biden seems to have been trading on his father’s famous name to make a buck—a common but distasteful practice familiar from Billy Carter to Roger Clinton, and indeed up to the Trump children today. He’s not exempt from criticism for this behavior, but that isn’t the same as producing evidence that Joe Biden did anything untoward, something that no one has done so far. It’s still possible that more information will emerge that will implicate Biden in trying to assist his son, but Trump has already rhetorically convicted him without any such evidence.
But as I say, the gullible, Fox News zone that the Trump supporting Right lives in just believe anything they are told from the special information bubble they live in.

6 comments:

Not Trampis said...

It actually gets worse. Biden accepted his position AFTER the prosecutor was sacked by parliament.

Steve said...

That's not what I've been reading, Homer What's your source?

Not Trampis said...

go to econbrowser and view the comments

Not Trampis said...

prosecutor dumped in 2013 Biden gets his 'ahem' cushy job in 2014.

The prosecutor was sacked by the Parliament for being bent

Steve said...

No, it's not right, Homer. A commenter at econbrowser links to a CNN explanation that indicates the think that the company was being investigated for was in 2013 and preceded Biden joining the company, but the sacked prosecutor was definitely sacked in March 2016 after Biden Jnr joined in 2014.: From CNN:

The investigation, as far as we know, was into the business activities of Mykola Zlochevsky, who owned a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, for which Hunter Biden had sat on the board of directors since 2014. The United Kingdom had begun investigating Zlochevsky before Hunter Biden joined the board.

"Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws -- at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing," Shokin's successor as prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, told Bloomberg. Of a 2013 business transaction that was part of the investigation, Lutsenko said, "(Hunter) Biden was definitely not involved. We do not have any grounds to think that there was any wrongdoing starting from 2014."

It is not clear how hard Shokin was investigating even Zlochevsky or Burisma at the time Joe Biden pushed for Shokin's firing. Kasko, the prosecutor who resigned from Shokin's office, told Bloomberg that the case was dormant at the time of Joe Biden's intervention: "There was no pressure from anyone from the US to close cases against Zlochevsky. It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015."

anon said...

Hunter Biden is a worthless drug addict. Why was he on the board?