Will Biden's Withdrawal Mean the End of Corruption Investigation?

By Hans Mahncke & Jeff Carlson

After an agonizing three-week wait that started with Joe Biden’s train wreck debate, Biden, or whoever acts on his behalf, has decided to throw in the towel.

But Biden will not go right away. We’ll have to wait until January until he’s gone. Contrary to the media’s pronouncements that Biden honorably stepped away from power, he is holding on to power. The only thing he stepped away from is getting humiliated in the November 5 election. 

But eventually, he will be gone, and there will be a new president. What will this mean for investigating Biden family corruption? Will those problems go away with him?

Presumably, Biden will pardon his son Hunter, who has already been convicted of firearms offenses and is scheduled to stand trial on other charges. Biden may also pardon his brother Jim, who has been implicated in Hunter’s various schemes. He probably won’t pardon himself, but that won’t be necessary anyway. As special counsel Robert Hur found, Biden is an “elderly man with a poor memory,” and it is unlikely that charges will ever be brought, whether it’s on the issue of retention of classified documents or on the issue of Ukraine.

It is, of course, on the issue of Ukraine that we arguably have the best evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, specifically that Biden fired the prosecutor who was pursuing Hunter’s oligarch boss. Biden even bragged about it during a speech at the Council of Foreign Relations in 2018. 

This leads us to ask: What will Biden’s departure mean for the history books? Will it mean that there will never be clarity, let alone accountability, for what Biden did in Ukraine?

One fact that we all painfully learned from the Hillary Clinton secret server saga, where the then incoming President Trump decided to let bygones be bygones, is that Democrats perceive kindness as weakness. 

It is indeed unlikely that anyone will muster the patience and perseverance to pursue Biden corruption once Biden is gone. But he is not yet gone and there is still time to unearth more evidence of Biden’s misdeeds in Ukraine, so at least historians will be able to tell the full story. 

We already know many parts of the story. But there is at least one known unknown which the public deserves to learn about. We area talking about draft copies of a speech Biden gave in Ukraine in December 2015. To their credit, House Republicans had previously identified this speech as evidence in their impeachment inquiry into Biden. But that was back in January 2024 and Biden has so far refused to hand over the drafts. It is entirely possible that with his exit, Republicans will drop the ball. 

Here’s how this speech fits into the wider context of Biden corruption in Ukraine:

On Dec 9, 2015, then Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech in the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada. 

We all know what he said because the speech was broadcast and we can also look at the transcript. What the transcript reveals is that Biden demanded it was “not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption but that rather “The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.”

This section is very important because previous US demands, which Ukraine fulfilled, had been to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and to establish a special prosecutor. But suddenly Biden was also demanding that the “Office of the General Prosecutor”, that means the office of prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, needed to be reformed. 

At the time that Biden made this demand, Shokin was investigating Burisma, Hunter’s corrupt energy firm. As part of that investigation, Shokin seized millions of dollars worth of property from Burisma’s owner, Mikola Zlochevsky. 

So the big question is whether the speech that Biden gave on Dec 9, 2015  was the same as the speech that Biden was initially supposed to give. Or was the part about Shokin added at the last minute?

That is the crux of the matter and the White House has been fighting hard to conceal the answer to that question.

Congress had sent a request for the original drafts of Biden’s Ukraine speech to the National Archives and Records Administration. 

NARA then asked the White House whether they could release the draft to the House Oversight Committee. Biden said no.

Significantly, NARA has confirmed that “a full set of documents that cover this request” exist. So there are original drafts of Biden’s speech, it’s just that Biden is not letting NARA hand them over. 

By the way, NARA is the same organization that Biden authorized to pursue President Trump regarding the allegedly missing Mar-a-Lago documents, so it’s more than a bit ironic that Biden instructed NARA not to release his own documents. 

While we do not know if there are material differences between the original drafts and the speech that Biden ended up delivering in the Rada, the fact that the speech is being concealed at least suggests that this might be the case. 

Why is this so important? If Biden added the part about Shokin at the last minute, then this would bring with it a number of very serious implications. 

That is because Biden’s Rada speech was the first time that he publicly indicated that Shokin needed to be fired. At the time, there was no US government policy to fire Shokin. In fact, US government officials had all expressed satisfaction with the job that Shokin was doing. Biden also leveraged a $1 billion US government loan guarantee to get Shokin fired. However, it was not the US government's policy to withhold the guarantee, let alone to make it contingent on the prosecutor being fired. 

The evidence shows beyond any doubt that it was Biden who single-handedly changed US government policy during his Rada speech. 

In fact, a US government interagency team, a term which generally denotes consensus meetings and decisions made by several US government agencies, decided on Sep 30, 2015 that Ukraine had done enough on the various tasks the US government had set them to deserve the loan guarantee. 

The interagency team also noted that the guarantee was urgently needed before the end of the year, that means to say before the end of 2015. 

In addition to the Sep 30 document, we also have an interagency team document from Nov 5, 2015, which pertains to the loan guarantee. This document confirms that, by November, US government policy had not changed, neither on Shokin, nor on the loan guarantee.

What had changed by November, though, was that the head of Burisma’s board, Vadym Pozharsky had traveled to Washington D.C. to personally demand from Hunter that Shokin’s investigations into Burisma needed to end. Pozharsky was so brazen about his demand that he put it in writing on Nov 2, 2015. 

Then, on Nov 22, 2015, Joe Biden suddenly decided that Shokin had to be fired. 

We know this from a little-noticed memo that was released as part of Trump’s Ukraine indictment. The memo reveals that on Nov 22, Joe Biden’s office issued a demand to Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, that Shokin had to be fired. 

While the memo was not public knowledge until much later, it does reveal when Biden first privately told Poroshenko that Shokin needed to be fired.

Then, in early December 2015, a few days before Biden gave his Rada speech, there was a White House conference that discussed Biden’s upcoming trip to Ukraine. Shockingly, Blue Star Strategies, the Democratic lobbyists whom Hunter Biden had hired to help him make Burisma’s problems go away, were on that call. In essence, a private group of lobbyists representing the Vice President’s son and a corrupt Ukrainian energy company, took part in a White House conference call to deliberate Joe Biden’s visit to Ukraine. 

A few days after the conference call with Blue Star, Biden flew to Ukraine and delivered his Rada speech, where he, for the first time, publicly called for changes in Shokin’s office. 

We all have a pretty good understanding of what happened. It stretches credulity to believe that Biden’s sudden demand to fire Shokin had nothing to do with Pozharsky’s demand that Biden fire Shokin. But it is often difficult to prove things that we instinctively know to be true. However, if the part about Shokin was inserted into Biden’s Rada speech at the last minute, it would go a long way to proving that there was indeed a quid pro quo. The answer should not be forever buried just because Biden has now withdrawn from the presidential race.