[meeuwer]

I agree, politicians can be hard to follow at times and Joe is no exception.

He's notorious for confusing and incoherent ramblings like this:

"I looked at them and said, ‘if the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money'. Well son of a bitch, he got fired".

We will never know what he meant, but I'm confident it was just a parable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXjLqhtnIRI

[ceejayoz]

Everyone was quite open about wanting Shokin gone. Biden isn't misspeaking here; he's stating the official policy of the US and EU at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Shokin

> Through 2015 and early 2016, domestic and international pressure (including from the IMF, the EU, and the EBRD) built for Shokin to be removed from office. The Obama administration withheld $1 billion in loan guarantees to pressure the Ukrainian government to remove Shokin from office.

[meeuwer]

It's great when corruption and influence peddling can happen out in the open. When it can become the official policy. Right?

> "The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors." Shokin continued, stating that, "On several occasions President Poroshenko asked me to have a look at the criminal case against Burisma and consider the possibility of winding down the investigative actions in respect of this company, but I refused to close this investigation."

Nothing fishy about any of this. Good, honest public servants doing their job.

[ceejayoz]

Poroshenko very emphatically denied this on Fox News recently. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/25/biden-ukr...

[meeuwer]

He also emphatically denied any wrongdoing after being named in the Panama Papers. What's the point you're making?

[ceejayoz]

The point is that the EU, IMF, US, and Ukraine itself appears to have wanted Shokin gone; he raided anti-corruption groups on pretenses; his prosecutors were demonstrably corrupt; public protests against him occurred, and Ukraine's parliament voted to get rid of him.

In opposition to all those facts, we have... Shokin himself being grumpy over being fired.

[meeuwer]

Just curious, how do you rationalize Hunter's employment at Burisma? Was it his business acumen or maybe background in natural gas? Or something else altogether?