- Mar 11, 2015
- 84,054
- 50,957
They can post a video, make bogus claims and repeat them over and over, but the truth is what they cannot face.
The time has come for Donald John Trump. And there ain't shit he and his cult followers can do about it.
Only in Trump’s world could what Joe Biden did in Ukraine be considered ‘corrupt’
By Michael Carpenter
October 7 at 10:15 AM
Michael Carpenter is senior director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
President Trump’s smear campaign against former vice president Joe Biden — a campaign that sought to enlist Ukrainian officials by threatening to withhold security assistance vital to Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression — is based on an Orwellian inversion of reality.
The smear perpetuates the widely refuted claim that Biden did something wrong during the Obama administration by pressing Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was regarded on both sides of the Atlantic as blatantly corrupt. The United States’ European allies and the Ukrainian anti-corruption community were already working to remove the prosecutor from office.
What’s striking about Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, is that they seem to be arguing that a figure at the epicenter of some of Ukraine’s most notorious corruption scandals should have remained in place.
One episode in particular illustrates why so many were eager to get rid of Viktor Shokin. Midway through his tenure as prosecutor general (February 2015 to March 2016), the Ukrainian Security Service raided the homes of two of Shokin’s subordinates and found a substantial stash of diamonds, cash and other valuables, leading the Ukrainian media to dub the two men the "diamond prosecutors.”
By early 2016, Shokin’s office had a well-earned international reputation for aiding and abetting corruption. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was so upset that its director, Christine Lagarde, refused to disburse additional tranches of a loan agreement to Ukraine until Shokin was removed and his office was thoroughly reformed, even though Ukraine was dangerously low on foreign currency reserves as it fought a grinding war against Russia.
U.S. officials pressed the same message on the Ukrainian government. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in October 2015 that “the Prosecutor General’s Office has to be reinvented as an institution that serves the citizens of Ukraine, rather than ripping them off.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...-joe-biden-did-ukraine-be-considered-corrupt/
The time has come for Donald John Trump. And there ain't shit he and his cult followers can do about it.
Only in Trump’s world could what Joe Biden did in Ukraine be considered ‘corrupt’
By Michael Carpenter
October 7 at 10:15 AM
Michael Carpenter is senior director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
President Trump’s smear campaign against former vice president Joe Biden — a campaign that sought to enlist Ukrainian officials by threatening to withhold security assistance vital to Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression — is based on an Orwellian inversion of reality.
The smear perpetuates the widely refuted claim that Biden did something wrong during the Obama administration by pressing Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was regarded on both sides of the Atlantic as blatantly corrupt. The United States’ European allies and the Ukrainian anti-corruption community were already working to remove the prosecutor from office.
What’s striking about Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, is that they seem to be arguing that a figure at the epicenter of some of Ukraine’s most notorious corruption scandals should have remained in place.
One episode in particular illustrates why so many were eager to get rid of Viktor Shokin. Midway through his tenure as prosecutor general (February 2015 to March 2016), the Ukrainian Security Service raided the homes of two of Shokin’s subordinates and found a substantial stash of diamonds, cash and other valuables, leading the Ukrainian media to dub the two men the "diamond prosecutors.”
By early 2016, Shokin’s office had a well-earned international reputation for aiding and abetting corruption. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was so upset that its director, Christine Lagarde, refused to disburse additional tranches of a loan agreement to Ukraine until Shokin was removed and his office was thoroughly reformed, even though Ukraine was dangerously low on foreign currency reserves as it fought a grinding war against Russia.
U.S. officials pressed the same message on the Ukrainian government. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in October 2015 that “the Prosecutor General’s Office has to be reinvented as an institution that serves the citizens of Ukraine, rather than ripping them off.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...-joe-biden-did-ukraine-be-considered-corrupt/
