microphor wrote:
no, Barrismo was corrupt and that's why it's CEO packed up his shit and left the country when this prosecutor started investigating them. What legitimate company would hire a drug addict with no experience to sit on their board for "50-87 thousand dollars a year" ? Put yourself in their place, it would go something like this: Hey partner 1, we need another board member on the team. Hey partner 2, I have an ideal, why don't we hire this guy name Hunter Biden, he's a drug addict with no experience but his dad is the vice president of the US, sounds reasonable to me "make it happen!
no, Barrismo was corrupt and that's why it's CEO p... (
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Joe Biden didn’t do anything to help Hunter in Ukraine
Back in 2014 after a change of regime in Ukraine, Hunter Biden joined the board of a scandal-plagued Ukrainian natural gas company named Burisma. Hunter had no apparent qualifications for the job except that his father was the vice president and involved in the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.
He got paid up to $50,000 per month for the job and the situation constituted the kind of conflict of interest that was normally considered inappropriate in Washington until the Trump era. These days, of course, the president of the United States regularly accepts payments from foreign sources to his company while in office, and so do the Trump children. The Obama administration probably should have done something about this at the time, but the White House couldn’t literally force Hunter not to accept the job. And given the larger family context, you can see why Joe might have been reluctant to confront his son about it.
This would all be a small footnote in history except that by 2016, officials throughout the Obama administration and in Western Europe had come to a consensus that Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, wasn’t doing enough to crack down on corruption. Biden, as he later colorfully recounted, delivered the message that the West wanted Shokin gone or else loan guarantees would be held up, and Shokin was, in turn, fired.
There was nothing remotely controversial about this at the time. No congressional Republicans complained about it, and the European Union hailed the decision to fire Shokin. The reason there is video footage of Biden touting his personal role in this is it was considered a foreign policy triumph that Biden wanted to claim credit for, not anything sordid or embarrassing.
But Shokin, of course, didn’t want to go down on the theory that he was corrupt or incompetent. So he started offering another theory: he was fired for going after Burisma by Joe Biden operating on behalf of Hunter Biden.
The question of whether Shokin was actually investigating Burisma at all is a matter of dispute (the relevant Ukrainian players have told inconsistent stories), but this is clearly not the reason he was fired. The desire to push him out was fully bipartisan in the United States and reflected a consensus across European governments, not anything idiosyncratic to Biden.
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2019/10/1/20891510/hunter-biden-burisma-ukraine-shokin