Just months before Joe Biden forced his firing, State Department officials told Ukraine’s chief prosecutor that they were “impressed” with his anti-corruption plan and supportive of his work, according to newly released memos. These new memos, as reported by Just the News, cast a shadow of doubt on a key Democrat impeachment narrative. Indeed, during […]
Just months before Joe Biden forced his firing, State Department officials told Ukraine’s chief prosecutor that they were “impressed” with his anti-corruption plan and supportive of his work, according to newly released memos.
These new memos, as reported by Just the News, cast a shadow of doubt on a key Democrat impeachment narrative.
Indeed, during Trump’s first impeachment trial two years ago, House Democrats alleged that Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired in March of 2016 because State officials were disappointed with his anti-corruption efforts, not because his office was investigating the Ukrainian gas firm that gave Hunter Biden a high-paying job.
The memos - obtained by Just the News and the Southeastern Legal Foundation under a FOIA request - show senior State Department officials, including then-Secretary of State John Kerry, were sending quite the opposite message to Shokin before he was fired.
“We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government,” then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland personally wrote Shokin in a letter in June of 2015.
Nuland, now Biden's undersecretary of state, wrote that "Secretary Kerry asked [her] to reply on his behalf" to let Shokin know he enjoyed the full support of the United States as he set out to fight corruption in the former Soviet republic.
"The ongoing reform of your office, law enforcement, and the judiciary will enable you to investigate and prosecute corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair, and transparent manner," Nuland added. "The United States fully supports your government's efforts to fight corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair and transparent manner."
The letter is significant to Republican congressional investigators and Trump’s formed impeachment defense lawyers because it was sent just six months before Biden began his campaign to oust Shokin in December 2015 and appears to conflict with testimony given to Congress.
They told Just the News they have no record the memo was produced to Trump’s impeachment defense team or to a Senate investigation that found Biden’s Ukrainian business to be a conflict of interest.
"We did not receive this. We should have received it. President Trump's defense attorneys also should have received it," Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who led a detailed investigation in 2020 into Hunter and Joe Biden's business affairs, told John Solomon.
"This just underscores how congressional oversight has really diminished over the years mainly because we don't have enforcement powers," he added. "Administration officials realize this bureaucrats realize this so they just thumbed their nose at congressional investigators that they run off the clock.”
In 2020, Nuland testified to the Senate that she and other State officials were frustrated by summer 2015 that Shokin wasn't doing enough to fight corruption, making no mention of her June 2015 missive that actually praised Shokin.
"So the initial expectation, when we began talking about the third loan guarantee, which I believe was in the summer of 2015, was that Prosecutor General Shokin make more progress than we had seen to clean up corruption inside the Prosecutor General's Office itself," she testified.
