Council on Foreign Relations
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2019–2020
59:50 · 820K views · Jan 23, 2018
A Council on Foreign Relations event where Joe Biden and Michael Carpenter discuss their Foreign Affairs article on defending democracy against Kremlin interference.
HN cites it mainly critically, for a clip in which Biden talks about getting a Ukrainian prosecutor fired.
4 comments from Hacker News
I know HN isn't really the place for this, but since you asked and I did a fairly deep dive into this just to know what's going on, here's what seems to have happened, complete with evidence to the contrary: From Wikipedia [LINK] : > Shokin claimed in May 2019 that he had been investigating Burisma Holdings.[28][29][30][31] However, Vitaliy Kasko, who had been Shokin's deputy overseeing international cooperation before resigning in February 2016 citing corruption in the office, provided documents to Bloomberg News indicating that under Shokin, the investigation into Burisma had been dormant.[32] Also, the investigation into Burisma only pertained to events happening before Hunter Biden joined the company.[33] I believe that's true, and the cited sources seem to check out, and predate this whole scandal. It's worth noting that a lot of these Ukrainian politicians are pretty sketchy and they have a big problem with corruption, so there are other geopolitical interests at play with these Ukrainian political figures. To be sure I'm not being duped by Wikipedia, I find Google News searches for articles about the key players in any controversy that were published before the MSM started caring give a way clearer picture of what's going on. It can help you figure out who's spinning what. It's helpful to know that Shokin was widely condemned for being a corrupt prosecutor that, ironically, wasn't pursuing corruption cases against political allies. From March 2016: [LINK] It's pretty c
Biden openly bragged about getting Shokin fired, though not under oath, and he stopped short of saying it was to protect his son. this video edit: phone brain skipped over the "on his behalf" part of the sentence, I thought that they'd said there was no evidence Biden even pressured the government to fire Shokin.
So, shouldn't you be in favor of the investigation into Biden? Since that is exactly what he did. "This plane's leaving in about 6 hours. If the prosecutor [investigating his son's firm] isn't fired, you're not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch, got fired!" 52 minutes in: this video
Here's a video of Joe Biden bragging about threatening to withhold aid to Ukraine in order to get the prosecutor who was investigating Hunter fired. this video