Hunter Biden’s Strange $50,000/mo. Ukrainian Gratuity

Vice President Joe Biden, flanked by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Toria Nuland, sits with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on February 7, 2015, before a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany. [StateDepartment photo/ Public Domain]

In the uproar over President Trump’s allegedly corrupt call to Ukraine, Pat Buchanan reminds readers of The American Conservative of what started the fiasco. As Vice President, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine’s President Poroshenko to fire Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor who had been investigating a firm with ties to Biden’s son, Hunter. Pat writes (abridged):

“Ukraine-gate” is the latest battle in the death struggle between the “deep state” and a president empowered by Middle America to go to Washington and break its grip on the national destiny.

With the revelation by an intel community “whistleblower” that President Donald Trump, in a congratulatory call to the new president of Ukraine, pushed him repeatedly to investigate the Joe Biden family connection to Ukrainian corruption, the cry “Impeach!” is being heard anew in the land.

But revisiting how this latest scandal came about, and how it has begun to unfold, it is a good bet that the principal casualty could be the former vice president. Consider.

In May 2016, Joe Biden, as Barack Obama’s designated point man on Ukraine, flew to Kiev to inform President Petro Poroshenko that a billion-dollar U.S. loan guarantee had been approved to enable Kiev to continue to service its mammoth debt.

But, said Biden, the aid was conditional. There was a quid pro quo.

If Poroshenko’s regime did not fire its chief prosecutor in six hours, Biden would fly home and Ukraine would get no loan guarantee. Ukraine capitulated instantly, said Joe, reveling in his pro-consul role.

Yet left out of Biden’s drama about how he dropped the hammer on a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor was this detail.

The prosecutor had been investigating Burisma Holdings, the biggest gas company in Ukraine. And right after the U.S.-backed coup that ousted the pro-Russian government in Kiev, and after Joe Biden had been given the lead on foreign aid for Ukraine, Burisma had installed on its board, at $50,000 a month, Hunter Biden, the son of the vice president.