Let’s recall why Trump tried to essentially extort Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. The ex-president wanted Zelensky’s help creating the false impression that a bribery scheme led Biden, as vice president, to call on the Ukrainian government to fire its prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. In 2018, Rudy Giuliani dispatched two henchmen — both now convicted felons — to Ukraine to find proof that Biden had targeted Shokin to protect the energy company Burisma, which had put Biden’s son Hunter on its board.
Not surprisingly, Giuliani’s men came back empty-handed. “Throughout all these months of work, the extensive campaigns and networking done by Trump allies and Giuliani associates, including the enormously thorough interviews and assignments that I undertook, there has never been any evidence that Hunter or Joe Biden committed any crimes related to Ukrainian politics,” one of the two men, Lev Parnas, wrote in a recent letter to the Republican chairman of the Oversight Committee.
It’s true that Hunter Biden almost certainly owed his Burisma gig to his family name, a sleazy arrangement if not an illegal or uncommon one. (See, for example, the $2 billion investment Jared Kushner received from a Saudi investment fund over the objections of the fund’s own advisers, which found the operations of Kushner’s firm “unsatisfactory in all aspects.”) Republicans have demonstrated, if it wasn’t clear already, that Hunter is a deeply compromised figure who should never hold any position of public trust. But Joe Biden wasn’t acting in his son’s interest when he called for the removal of Shokin.
Shokin’s removal was a priority for Ukraine’s Western allies because he was, as The New York Times reported in 2016, “widely criticized for turning a blind eye to corrupt practices and for defending the interests of a venal and entrenched elite.” Among those Shokin was alleged to have protected was none other than Mykola Zlochevsky, head of Burisma. The anti-corruption activist Daria Kaleniuk told The Intercept that Shokin was fired for his failure to investigate the “corruption and economic crimes” of the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was deposed and fled to Russia, “and his close associates, including Zlochevsky.” It’s hard to see what Zlochevsky had to gain if Shokin were replaced by a prosecutor with more integrity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Trump from trying to manipulate Zelensky into opening an investigation into Biden, Shokin and Burisma, part of an effort to give weight to his smears of Biden. At the time of Trump’s first impeachment, those smears were repeatedly debunked. But now Republicans claim they have a reason for resurrecting them: House investigators recently discovered an F.B.I. document from 2020 that mentions a confidential source claiming to have heard Zlochevsky bragging about paying the Bidens to deal with Shokin. According to the document, this confidential source claimed Zlochevsky had 17 recordings to back him up.