No link. Live on TV. Damning timeline. This is the most succinct, thorough, well-delivered presentation on the Biden/Burisma issue to date. Wow
EDITED to add the below video of Pam Bondi's presentation. All should watch this. Highly informative.
Here are four key facts Bondi omitted:
1. Shokin’s former deputy, Vitaliy Kasko, said the investigation into Burisma and company owner Mykola Zlochevsky was
inactive at the time of Joe Biden’s pressure in late 2015 and early 2016. A leading Ukrainian anti-corruption activist said the same.
"Shokin was not investigating. He didn't want to investigate Burisma," Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of Ukraine's Anti-Corruption Action Center, told the Washington Post for a July article. "And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation."
2. Shokin was widely seen — by Ukrainian activists, US diplomats, European governments and the International Monetary Fund — as
ineffective or corrupt. In a speech in 2015,
Geoffrey Pyatt, then the US ambassador to Ukraine, castigated Shokin’s office for impeding the investigation of Burisma’s owner Zlochevsky. Pyatt called for people in Shokin’s office to be fired, “at minimum.”
“Rather than supporting Ukraine’s reforms and working to root out corruption, corrupt actors within the prosecutor general’s office are making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform,” Pyatt said.
3. Biden was acting in accordance with
official US policy. Because of Shokin’s reputation, the US and its allies believed that removing him would increase, not decrease, the chances of people like Zlochevsky being pursued.
"What former Vice President Biden requested of former president of Ukraine, (Petro) Poroshenko, was the removal of a corrupt prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin,”
George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, testified in the impeachment inquiry. Kent went on to say Shokin had “undermined” a US-funded program to try to investigate corrupt Ukrainian prosecutors.
4. Some Republican senators had also demanded changes to the prosecutor general’s office Shokin led.
In a bipartisan
2016 letter, Republican senators Rob Portman, Mark Kirk and Ron Johnson joined Democratic colleagues in calling on then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to "press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General's office and judiciary."
Trump impeachment trial: Live updates and latest news - CNNPolitics
She's doing nothing but stroking tRump.