Firing of Viktor Shokin
In December of 2015, Joe Biden as Vice President went on a trip to Ukraine to have a meeting with Ukrainian President at the time Petro Poroshenko about corruption in Ukraine.(Washington Post, Kessler) One of the leading goals of this meeting was the removal of a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, viewed by the United States and various European officials, including ones in the European Union,(Irish Times, McLaughlin) as an impediment to proper reform.(Washington Post, Kessler)
During this meeting, to accomplish the primary goal, Biden threatened to not sign on the $1 billion aid that was being offered to Ukraine to pressure Poroshenko to fire Shokin.(Washington Post, Kessler) The only problem with this was that there was a potential conflict of interest, because Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a board member of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, that had an investigation on them by Shokin.(AP News, Braun) Due to this conflict of interest, it created a conspiracy theory that Joe Biden threated to fire Shokin so that his son would be protected from persecution of potential crimes.(New York Post, Nelson)
The main problem with this conspiracy, however, was that besides the fact that Shokin was generally seen as a bad and corrupt prosecutor for months prior to this meeting by the United States, various European officials, including ones in the European Union,(Irish Times, McLaughlin) and the Ukrainian people at large,(Kyiv Post, Chernichkin, Sukhov) there was also the fact that Shokin shelved the cases against Hunter Biden well before the meeting with Joe Biden and Petro Poroshenko.(Bloomberg, Baker, Krasnolutska)
In an interview with Politifact, former American ambassador for Ukraine prior to the interview, Steven Pifer, stated the following:(Politifact, Jacobson)
Quote
It was a mistake for Hunter Biden to join the Burisma board, particularly given that the vice president was the senior U.S. official engaging Ukraine(Politifact, Jacobson|Pifer)
Bribery allegation
Alexander Smirnov in June of 2020 claimed to the FBI that the owner of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, paid Hunter Biden and Joe Biden $5 million a month to ensure Shokin would be fired.(FBI) However, these claims would later be found to likely be completely false and made up to the FBI intentionally, which would later lead to Smirnov’s arrest and grand jury indictment.(AP News, Whitehurst & Mascaro) (AP News, Slodysko, Tucker, & McCartney)