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So if there are no facts, what needs to be investigated, exactly? Legolas Send a noteboard - 05/02/2020 07:29:10 PM

View original postThere has been no investigation other than a blanket "nothing to see here" from Yury Lutsenko, the corrupt former prosecutor with no law degree appointed after Joe Biden had his predecessor fired for investigating Burisma. The current Ukrainian government realizes that anything they do (investigate, not investigate) has political repercussions in the US and is trying to avoid getting sucked in further.

'Joe Biden' did not have Shokin fired. All the main international actors supporting Ukraine, including the EU, US and the IMF, demanded to have Shokin fired. Joe Biden went to Ukraine in December and made those threats he later boasted about, but in reality Shokin was't fired until several months later. And I haven't seen it reported anywhere if Biden's threat about withholding aid if Shokin wasn't fired, was actually carried out by the US government.

Secondly, it seems to be rather in dispute whether Shokin was in fact making any significant progress on the investigation into Burisma, which already existed before he came into office. He says he was, but the people working for him say he wasn't. And in support of the latter position: the American ambassador to Ukraine, in September 2015, complained about Ukraine's failure to cooperate with the British investigation into Zlochevsky, in a public speech in Odessa.

And thirdly, the Zlochevsky/Burisma investigation was focused on events prior to Burisma's high-profile BoD recruitments of Hunter Biden, Alexander Kwasniewski and others in 2014. So Hunter Biden wasn't personally at risk in that investigation.

As I've mentioned in one of the earlier replies, I would agree that the Obama government shouldn't have let Joe Biden take such an active role on Shokin or Ukraine in general under the circumstances. Especially considering his son and brother's track record. But he's not the one who decided Shokin had to go - and there's no reason that I know of to believe that Shokin's staying or going would personally affect the Biden family, both because it's not clear he was actually any threat to Burisma/Zlochevsky, and because that investigation didn't threaten Hunter Biden personally.

View original postHowever, there will never be "facts" to show that Hunter Biden or Joe Biden did anything illegal other than what is undisputed. The undisputed facts show that, per the Trump impeachment standard, Joe Biden did something he should have been impeached for. He withheld allocated funding to Ukraine unless and until he got something he personally wanted (the firing of Viktor Shokin). He claims his motive was "fighting corruption" (though replacing one corrupt prosecutor in a long line of corrupt prosecutors is sort of irrelevant) but he also stood to benefit from it because it helped his son and his son's company. Likewise, Trump claimed he wanted to investigate corruption (this time by the Bidens) but also stood to benefit from it if it took out a potential political opponent in the 2020 election.

I would accept your analogy if you actually had evidence showing:
- that the joint EU/US/IMF position on firing Shokin was entirely or largely based on Joe Biden's personal position
- and that funding actually was withheld, and if so, without the required notifications to Congress

The latter, I don't actually know, I would be surprised but I don't rule it out. But the former is pretty preposterous, so that would require rather solid proof before I'll believe it.

View original postSo, as I have said on multiple occasions, if we can impute motive then Trump had every right to investigate Biden, the phone call was fine and he shouldn't have been impeached. If we can't impute motives, then his stated motive of seeking to investigate corruption is legitimate and the call is fine and he shouldn't have been impeached. You consistently ignore this.

Two wrongs don't make a right; if your accusations against Joe Biden were true, then I agree he would've been guilty of essentially the same thing as Trump and should have faced the same legal consequences (I would personally say impeachment, but clearly there are a lot of people in Congress who don't actually think such actions warrant impeachment).

And for what it's worth, I do think that if a whistleblower back in 2015-2016 had brought to light evidence showing that indeed Shokin was on the verge of creating legal trouble for Hunter Biden, and that Joe Biden was personally behind the anti-Shokin stance and had convinced not only the US government but also the EU and IMF to go along with it, it would have resulted in a scandal that could only have ended in Biden's resignation or firing - or his impeachment, if for whatever strange reason neither of the other two happened.

View original postHowever, if you want to go down the road of imputing motive, there IS a hell of a lot of circumstantial evidence that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden are guilty as charged. There are a string of "coincidences" that, by applying Ockham's Razor (or Occam's Razor if you prefer the Latinized version), we can only conclude they were engaging in corruption.

I've basically covered the Ukrainian side of these above, so will skip a bit.
View original postIn July, Trump tries to get Zelensky to investigate Burisma in the July 25 call. Zelensky can't really do it, though, because Lutsenko hasn't been removed yet. This doesn't happen until August 29, when he is finally removed and someone who actually has a law degree becomes the top prosecutor for the country, thus ending a three year farce.

Regarding all your complaints about Lutsenko: see link. Seems Lutsenko was only too happy to investigate Burisma and get Giuliani all the dirt he wanted - as long as he was getting what he wanted in return.
View original postIt is at this point that Vindman, who should not be where he is because his anti-Trump, pro-Ukraine and pro-Biden stance should be considered a conflict of interest, tells Eric Ciaramella about the call. Ciaramella, who accompanied Biden to Ukraine and is also anti-Trump, pro-Ukraine and pro-Biden, talks to his friends in Adam Schiff's office. They can't let someone actually investigate the dirty dealings of the Bidens. So Ciaramella liaises with Schiff's office to write a whistleblower complaint that Schiff then conveniently lies about not knowing about, starting the impeachment process.

The whistleblower complaint was filed on August 12th, so your timeline is off by several weeks. Either way, the whistleblower ceased to be relevant the minute the WH released their own summary of the call, providing obvious grounds for further investigation. I don't know a thing about Ciaramella, quite possibly he may have been anti-Trump, but since the WH summary made clear the same points he had flagged, you can't blame him for anything worse than being a tattle-tale. Considering the approaching deadline for the aid to be paid and the increasingly exasperated communications from the Pentagon to the OMB throughout August, I find it hard to see how the WH could have prevented the whole episode from becoming public knowledge in some other way, if he hadn't flagged it.

As for the point about Vindman, let's be serious: the State Department is understaffed enough as it is. If they had to fire everybody who thinks Trump is a moron, which incidentally I'm not aware Vindman ever said, Pompeo might find it rather challenging to do the work of thousands of people all by himself. Although to be fair, I do rather suspect Pompeo also thinks Trump is a moron.

Lutsenko-Parnas texts
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