by Frank Holmes, reporter
Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign just ran into a land mine, as explosive news from Eastern Europe brought his family’s most public scandal under new scrutiny.
After months of delay and smokescreens, the former vice president has been named as an official party to a criminal investigation in Ukraine.
Biden admitted he threatened the president of Ukraine with withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid unless he fired the prosecutor investigating the company that employed his son, Hunter Biden.
That prosecutor, Victor Shokin, has brought charges that Biden’s leaning on then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko amounted to criminal interference to keep him from doing his job.
The Kyiv Post reported in February that Shokin “managed to get two criminal probes opened against Biden” after “multiple appeals to a Ukrainian court.”
There was a problem: Shokin named names, but the government would not.
Ukrainian officials refused to put the vice president’s name into court transcripts. Legal documents said only that an anonymous American citizen named Joe “committed unlawful interference in his activities as the Head of the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine.”
Politicians may not have wanted to get on the wrong side of the famously thin-skinned Biden, who is favorited in some polls to win the 2020 presidential election.
Shokin sued, and a court agreed that Ukraine had whitewashed Biden out of the criminal complaint.
According to the April 21 court order, Ukrainian politicians had been guilty of “not entering of information about a criminal offense” into the register.
District Court Judge S. V. Vovk said “the commission of this criminal offense” was performed, not “by a non-abstract US citizen, but the former U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden.”
From this time forward, all court documents have to openly admit to the alleged “interference in the activities of the former Prosecutor General of Ukraine … performed by citizen of the United States of America Joseph Biden, former U.S. Vice President.”
That means Biden has officially been named as a part of a criminal offense—an act far more serious than anything President Donald Trump had been accused of his impeachment hearings.
So far, though, Ukrainian courts have still refused to update their records to name Biden, Shokin’s lawyer told reporter John Solomon of JustTheNews.com.
The news of the charges accompanies the recording of a phone call reportedly made between Biden and Poroshenko discussing the deal.
In the recording, which has not yet been officially verified. Poroshenko tells Biden that he pressured Shokin to resign as the “second step” necessary for Biden to green-light the funds.
Biden later says, “now that the new prosecutor general is in place, we’re ready to move forward in signing that new $1 billion loan guarantee.”
Investigators say President Poroshenko made the recording himself and has been foisted on his own petard. Poroshenko’s spokesperson says the recording is a Russian hoax.
The legal case continues to play out in foreign courts, but the facts are undisputed.
Biden admitted to denying $1 billion in U.S. aid unless Poroshenko gave Shokin the axe in March 2016.
Shokin had been investigating Burisma Holdings, the natural gas firm that paid Hunter Biden up to $83,333 a month during the Obama administration.
In all, Burisma shelled out $3.4 million to Biden’s company, Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC.
Hunter Biden has no background in natural gas or the energy industry.
Critics say this was an example of foreign influence-peddling.
Joe Biden said the deal was above-board and that he only wanted Shokin fired because he was an ineffective prosecutor. The fact that he was investigating Hunter Biden’s cash cow was a coincidence.
Biden, who’s been sheltering in his basement since the outbreak of the Wuhan Flu pandemic, hasn’t responded to being named in an official criminal investigation.
You can read the full English translation of the Ukrainian court order here.
Biden’s campaign can read it and weep.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front