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Hunter Biden in the Ukraine

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Joe Biden's Democratic rivals are going to have to try to cut him down to size. Biden was becoming the Cascades Bigfoot of their fight for their party's nomination even before he announced he was running.

Now that he has announced that he IS running, Bigfoot is likely to turn into a Himalayan Yeti. (Yes, I'm assuming that's larger.)

They may well use the tale of Hunter Biden's Ukraine adventure to this end. I'm looking at news reports and trying to get a handle on this.

Hunter Biden, the former VP's younger son, is not to be confused with his brother Beau, the fellow who succumbed to cancer in 2015.

Hunter was a director of eCommerce policy issues in the Department of Commerce under President Clinton. He much later (in 2014) became a member of the board of something called Burisma Holdings, the largest non-government natural gas producer in the Ukraine. That's where our story starts to pick up.

Only FOUR DAYS after Burisma announced that Hunter Biden was a member of its board, VP Joe Biden travelled to the Ukraine and met with government officials, urging them to increase their production of ... wait for it ... natural gas. Of course there is a perfectly good policy reason for him to have urged this: more domestic production means more independence vis-a-vis Russia and its natgas pipeline. Dependence on that pipeline assists Putin in his ambition to restore the old Soviet hegemony in the region.

So ... here's a policy that is good for the Ukraine as an independent sovereign, but also very good for VP Biden's son. And the odd timing certainly makes it look like the latter point may have crossed the VP's mind. That's not good. But things get worse.

Ukraine's Prosecutor General, Viktor Shokin, eventually started investigating corruption in Burisma Holdings. On another trip to that country, in 2016, Daddy Biden (still acting as his administration's point man for Ukraine policy) threatened to have the US withhold $1 billion of loan guarantees unless Shokin was fired. The threat worked. Shokin was fired.

Again, let us add a caveat: THERE WERE (AT LEAST ARGUABLY) GOOD POLICY REASONS WHY A US OFFICIAL SHOULD HAVE URGED SHOKIN'S FIRING. He was widely suspected, in his own country and in much of the rest of the world, of being at least as corrupt as anyone he was investigating for the same. So again, a Jamesian might "will to believe" that Biden only wanted a cleaned-up Ukrainian government the better to serve as a bulwark against Putin -- that his son's business and legal interest in the matter didn't cross his mind. Still, not every one will engage in that act of will.

In recent weeks, intriguingly, the prosecutor who replaced Shokin has revived that office's investigation of Burisma. This earned the matter a big front-page article in The New York Times yesterday, and it will certainly give Biden's intra-party foes ammunition. 






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