Ukraine is reportedly about to fire a prosecutor who investigated allegations of corruption surrounding natural gas company Burisma Holdings and Hunter Biden, son of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Kostiantyn Kulyk, a deputy of ex-prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, took over the probe after Lutsenko’s predecessor, Viktor Shokin, was fired under pressure from then-Vice President Joe Biden. Kulyk will be removed for failing to attend a mandatory legal exam aimed at rooting out corruption, a source told Reuters.
Ukrainian official who investigated Biden to be fired
The Bidens have come under scrutiny over Hunter’s highly-paid position on the board of Burisma, which coincided with his father’s “anti-corruption” work in Ukraine as then-President Barack Obama’s point man in Kyiv. The former vice president has been accused of corrupt pay-to-play dealing by pressuring Ukraine to fire Shokin, who had investigated Burisma, by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees.
Joe and Hunter Biden have vehemently denied all wrongdoing, and the mainstream media has dutifully nodded along by writing off the accusations as a “conspiracy theory.” Shokin’s successor, Lutsenko, re-opened the probe but eventually concluded that he found no wrongdoing by either Biden.
However, it hasn’t been established that the Biden-Ukraine story is a “conspiracy theory” by any means, and Kulyk, who led the criminal probe as Lutsenko’s deputy, compiled a seven-page “dossier” on supposed corruption by Hunter Biden in Ukraine, according to Reuters.
President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani has said that Kulyk backed up accusations that the Bidens sought to close down investigations of Burisma in Ukraine. “[Kulyk] was another prosecutor somewhat lower level who told me the same thing: that there was collusion and Biden had [the] prosecutor fired to kill case on [his] son and Burisma,” Giuliani said.
The legal exam, which has prompted prosecutor Ruslan Ryaboshapka to fire about a third of his staff, is part of an effort to purge Ukraine’s justice system of corruption. Several characters in the Biden-Ukraine story are prosecutors who have themselves been accused of wrongdoing, including Shokin, who was widely seen as corrupt by international institutions who sought his ouster, according to the official mainstream media narrative.
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Kulyk did not provide an excuse for missing the test and will be dismissed by December 31, Reuters reported. Some prosecutors sat-out the exam in protest of what they call a political purge by Ukraine’s new president Vlodomyr Zelensky, who is at the center of the international maelstrom involving President Trump.
To put it mildly, keeping track of the credibility of the various actors in the story is somewhat of a mug’s game. But “fact checkers” in the media have cherry-picked certain figures to bolster the “it’s a conspiracy” narrative, for example, Shokin’s former deputy, who has said that the investigation was “dormant” under Shokin.
The media have also pointed to Lutsenko, who communicated with Giuliani about corruption involving the Bidens before stating that he found no wrongdoing, although Lutsenko has himself been accused of corruption and abuses of power. Kulyk investigated Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma and a former minister of Ukraine’s ex-president Viktor Yanukovych, with renewed vigor after Giuliani’s talks with Lutsenko, according to Reuters.
Like several Ukrainian prosecutors involved in the Biden-Ukraine story, Kulyk has also been accused of wrongdoing, in this case, illegal enrichment in 2016 and ties to an alleged Russian spy, according to the Washington Examiner.
But in turn, Kulyk has suggested he possesses evidence of wrongdoing by unnamed “American Democrats.” In an April column for The Hill, investigative reporter John Solomon reported that Kulyk said ex-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch (who has since been hailed by the media for testifying against Trump in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry) prevented him from sharing the evidence with the FBI by withholding his visa.
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