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Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory

The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of unconfirmed claims centered on the false allegation that while Joe Biden was vice president of the United States, he engaged in corrupt activities relating to the employment of his son, Hunter Biden, by the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. They were spread primarily in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's reputation during the 2020 presidential campaign. United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration." The New York Times reported in May 2021 that a federal criminal investigation was examining a possible role by current and former Ukrainian officials, including whether they used former Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who is the subject of a separate federal investigation, to spread unsubstantiated claims.

The conspiracy theory alleges that then-Vice President Biden withheld loan guarantees to pressure Ukraine into firing a prosecutor to prevent a corruption investigation into Burisma and to protect his son. The United States did withhold government aid to pressure Ukraine into removing the prosecutor, in accord with the official and bipartisan policy of the federal government of the United States. The US government, along with the European Union, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, believed the prosecutor to be corrupt and ineffective and too lenient in investigating companies and oligarchs, including Burisma and its owner. A January 2018 video shows Biden taking credit for withholding the loan guarantees to have the prosecutor fired, acting to implement bipartisan US policy rather than for the reasons the conspiracy theory alleges.

In October 2020, during the last weeks of the presidential campaign, the New York Post published an article, with the involvement of Donald Trump's personal attorney Giuliani and former chief strategist Steve Bannon, about a found laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden. The laptop contained an email, the authenticity of which was not verified, showing what the New York Post characterized as a "meeting" between Joe Biden and Vadym Pozharskyi, a Burisma advisor, in 2015, though that characterization was disputed by witnesses. The article's veracity was strongly questioned by most mainstream media outlets, analysts and intelligence officials, due to the questionable provenance of the laptop and its contents, and the suspicion that it may have been part of a disinformation campaign. It was later confirmed that at least some of the laptop materials were genuine, though fake material may have been mixed in with it, and Hunter Biden said that it is possible the laptop could be his.

Hunter Biden Left Ukrainian Company in 2019, Contrary to Ted Nugent Post

Hunter Biden served on the board of the Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma Holdings from 2014 to 2019. But Ted Nugent posted a Facebook meme falsely insinuating that Hunter’s payments from the company ended with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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In May 2014, Hunter Biden — the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden — became a board member of Burisma Holdings Ltd., one of the biggest private oil and gas companies in Ukraine.

The hiring led to scrutiny in the media, including an Associated Press article that called Hunter’s hiring “politically awkward” because the Obama administration was looking to “influence the policies of Ukraine’s new government, especially on energy issues.”

During the 2020 presidential campaign, then-President Donald Trump repeatedly twisted the facts surrounding Hunter’s work with the gas company, falsely claiming that Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who “was after his son,” Hunter, and “was prosecuting” him.

As we wrote several times, Mykola Zlochevsky, Burisma’s founder, was the subject of a series of criminal investigations, but there was no evidence that Hunter was ever under investigation or that Joe Biden pressured the Ukraine government on his son’s behalf.

Hunter Biden resigned from the company in April 2019, while his father was running for president...But as we say above, Hunter left the Burisma board back in 2019 — almost three years before the war in Ukraine began.

Fact check: Biden leveraged $1B in aid to Ukraine to oust corrupt prosecutor, not to help his son

It's true that Joe Biden leveraged $1 billion in aid to persuade Ukraine to oust its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in March 2016. But it wasn't because Shokin was investigating Burisma. It was because Shokin wasn't pursuing corruption among the country's politicians.

As European and American diplomats pressed Ukraine to clean up its corruption, they focused on Shokin's leadership of the Prosecutor General's Office, which he took over in February 2015.

...Charlie Kupchan, who was a special assistant to President Barack Obama and a senior director for European Affairs on the National Security Council, said anti-corruption efforts were "a big part of our diplomacy" with Ukraine, since "it was that corruption that allowed Russia to manipulate the country politically and economically."

As a result, Biden leveraged $1 billion in aid as "a stick to move Ukraine forward," Kupchan said. "He was acting alongside our European allies. Everybody was of a single mind that this prosecutor was not the right guy for the job."

Daria Kaleniuk, the co-founder and executive director of the Anti Corruption Action Centre in Kyiv, Ukraine, credited Biden, the International Monetary Fund — which threatened to delay $40 billion in aid for similar reasons — and others with the prosecutor's removal...Burisma Holdings was not under scrutiny at the time Joe Biden called for Shokin to be removed, per the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, an independent agency that has worked closely with the FBI.

In 2014, Shokin had investigated Burisma for money laundering and tax irregularities, per USA TODAY.

The probe focused on 2010-12, according to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.

Hunter Biden — who joined the board in 2014 and served on it until early 2019 — was not the subject of the investigation.