Yesterday I became interested in the question of just how corrupt the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was – the man Joe Biden bragged about pressuring the Ukrainian government to fire. That’s because it is at least possible that Joe Biden’s pressure to fire the prosecutor was a bona fide exercise of US government policy due to that corruption – although it would still remain suspicious because it serves the financial interests of his son, who already appears to be enriching himself from connections related to his father’s position rather than any skills that son may possess.

The search led me deeper and deeper into the complex politics and exceedingly murky atmosphere of Ukraine, where corruption seems to be so widespread you can’t tell who’s who or what’s what, and the good guys are hard to find.

So I have no problem whatsoever believing that Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor in question, was corrupt. Perhaps even very corrupt. The trouble is: compared to what? And about what? And to what purpose?

The situation is complicated by the fact that at this point everyone has a reason to spin it, now that it’s become a Trump and Biden issue. So I decided to go back in time and look only at articles written before that story broke.

And I still can’t sort it out. I suppose I could spend many days on this (although I almost certainly won’t), but right now I’ll just give you some links to read: this and this.

So let’s assume that there were a lot of independent reasons for wanting Shotkin fired for corruption. But Biden’s problems stem from the fact that there was one bad reason, which is that his son Hunter was apparently being investigated by Shotkin. But to me, that’s not even the biggest issue. The bigger issue is actually the hiring of Hunter Biden in the first place, because that raises the possibility of other corruption on Joe Biden’s part.

It’s not hard to find articles about that, for example this one as well as this.

Suspicious, to say the least.

But even more astounding to me was this article by Andrew C. McCarthy, whom I’ve found to be quite trustworthy over the many years I’ve been reading his work. That article is an excerpt from a book of his, Ball of Collusion, that came out in August before the whole Trump/Biden/Ukraine phone call story came to the fore.

You almost certainly have heard about Biden’s pressure on Ukraine, and you may have also heard about the US senators who tried to pressure Ukraine to help with the Mueller investigation. And yet McCarthy describes a whole other episode the details of which I’d not been aware of previously, although I had some vague recollection about the general thrust of it. The subject is the prosecution of an American – Paul Manafort, who was connected with Trump and whose downfall could hurt Trump politically:

In February 2014, the Ukrainian Euromaidan uprising finally forced the flight to Moscow of Manafort’s client, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. With American attention intensifying as tensions boiled over in Kiev, Manafort reentered the FBI’s investigative cross-hairs…

Yanukovych’s abdication delighted the Obama administration, which was quick to back the new administration of President Petro Poroshenko. Kiev became so dependent on Washington for desperately needed financial support that, by threatening to withhold funds, Vice President Joe Biden pressured Poroshenko into firing Viktor Shokin, one of his top prosecutors. Shokin just happened to be investigating a natural gas company called Burisma, which just happened to have placed Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, on its board of directors.

That much we already know.

McCarthy continues:

…the Obama administration prodded Ukraine to establish a National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU)…

In 2014, NABU alerted the [FBI] to a ledger said to have belonged to Yanukovych, bête noire of the new Ukrainian government. The ledger purports to show $12.7 million in cash payments to Manafort. The FBI used the information to interview Manafort, but the authenticity of the ledger has not been established. Manafort dismisses it as fake, contending that the Party of Regions paid him by wire transfer, not cash. Ukrainian officials have conceded that they cannot prove the payments reflected in the ledger were made. The case was thus reportedly closed with no charges. (Perhaps not coincidental to the Obama Justice Department’s decision not to pursue the case: Manafort had brought influential Democrats into his Ukrainian work, such as former Obama White House Counsel Greg Craig and the consulting firm started by Obama and Clinton adviser John Podesta — a firm that is still run by Podesta’s brother.)

But then came 2016, and sudden renewed interest in the Manafort- Ukraine investigation … just as the U.S. presidential campaign kicked into high gear.

…Manafort busied himself by propping up a new Ukrainian political organization, the Opposition Bloc, to supplant the Party of Regions.

That put Manafort on the radar screen of Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American and a DNC consultant who was all in for Hillary…

Chalupa also had good sources in Kiev who were focused on Manafort. These included Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian legislator opposed to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions and the Opposition Bloc, and Artem Sytnyk, NABU’s director. It was Sytnyk who took over and quietly closed the investigation of Burisma after Vice President Biden got Poroshenko to pink-slip the prosecutor.

Leshchenko just happens to be a vassal of Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian billionaire who just happens to give millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. Wonder of wonders, Leshchenko took a public, strident anti-Trump position during the U.S. campaign — highly unusual for a foreign parliamentarian.

But here’s the most interesting part:

During the same early 2016 weeks when Chalupa was tapping her Ukrainian sources and giving Democrats a heads-up about a potential Manafort-Trump alliance, NABU investigators and Ukrainian prosecutors journeyed to Washington. There, the Obama administration arranged for them to huddle with the FBI, the Justice Department, the State Department, and the White House’s National Security Council (agencies that coordinated frequently throughout the collusion caper). Andrii Telizhenko, a political officer at Ukraine’s embassy in Washington, later told The Hill’s John Solomon that the U.S. officials uniformly stressed “how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united.” The officials also indicated to their Ukrainian counterparts that they were keen to revive the investigation of payments by Yanukovych’s ousted Party of Regions government to an American political consultant — i.e., the FBI’s Paul Manafort probe. I know this may be hard to believe, but the Obama officials seem to have been less interested in Greg Craig than in Manafort.

Nazar Kholodnitskiy, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told Solomon that soon after the January 2016 Washington meetings, he found that Ukrainian officials were effectively meddling in the American presidential election. Another top Ukrainian lawman, Kostiantyn Kulyk, recalled that after the Kiev contingent’s return home from the United States, there was lots of buzz about helping the Americans with the Party of Regions investigation.

Which brings us back to Serhiy Leshchenko, Ukraine’s unabashed Clinton backer. And whaddya know — besides serving the government in Kiev and providing scintillating geopolitical analysis, Leshchenko had a side job: he was a source for…wait for it…Fusion GPS — the Clinton campaign-opposition arm, led by Glenn Simpson, which later dreamed up the Steele dossier.

Turns out it was Leshchenko (along with NABU chief Sytnyk) who leaked the unverified Yanukovych ledger to the media in May 2016, just after it was announced that Trump had made Manafort his campaign chairman. There is also a pending investigation into whether Leshchenko attempted to blackmail Manafort by sending text messages to the consultant and his daughter, threatening to give NABU, the FBI, and the media “bulletproof” evidence of Manafort’s financial dealings with Yanukovych.

The ledger’s exposure, of course, is what led to Manafort’s ouster as Donald Trump’s campaign chairman. The Ukrainian payments became an important strand of the Russia-gate narrative. The wealth that Manafort’s Ukrainian work generated formed the foundation of his prosecution by Special Counsel Mueller for tax, money laundering, and unregistered foreign-agent offenses.

Can anyone say “Clinton campaign collusion with Ukraine”? The Ukrainian courts can: In December 2018, one such tribunal ruled that Leshchenko and Sytnyk had violated Ukrainian law by leaking the ledger. The infraction, the court added, “led to interference in the electoral processes of the United States in 2016 and harmed the interests of Ukraine as a state.”

That’s a lot to chew and digest.