The Ukrainian prosecutor general announced that his office would be reviewing all the cases that were shut down by his predecessors, including a number of cases that mention the founder of the energy company where Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board.
Prosecutor General Ruslan Ryaboshapka made the announcement Friday, telling reporters that his office under newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky would reopen a bevy of closed cases, citing potential corruption from his predecessors.
“We are now reviewing all the cases that were closed or split into several parts or were investigated before in order to be able to rule to reverse those cases where illegal procedural steps were taken,” Ryaboshapka said.
Those cases being reviewed include ones that were closed by former top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who former Vice President Joe Biden bragged that he helped fire. Shokin had at one point been investigating Mykola Zlochevsky and his company, Burisma Holdings. Hunter Biden sat on the board of Burisma for years, prompting President Trump and others to wonder about a possible conflict of interest in Biden’s push to have Shokin dismissed.
Despite the allegations, a number of individuals and entities had pushed for Shokin to be removed, citing corruption. Joe Biden has claimed that the move had nothing to do with his son’s interest in the company but rather corruption within the Ukrainian government.
The issue was brought to the forefront of the American political scene when a yet-to-be identified whistleblower filed a complaint with the Intelligence Community inspector general saying that Trump exerted improper pressure on Zelensky to investigate the Bidens, alleging that there was a quid pro quo involved.
Trump has stringently denied the claims, but the existence of the complaint was enough for Democrats to launch a formal impeachment inquiry into the president.
Ryaboshapka said Friday in Kyiv that 15 of the cases being examined mention the names of Zlochevsky and businessman Sehiy Kurchenko, although when asked if any, or how many, of those cases relate to Hunter Biden, Ryaboshapka declined to specify.
Ryaboshapka also said Friday that he is working hard to scrub the prosecutor’s office itself of corruption.
“We were cleaning up the prosecutor office,” he told reporters. “As you know practically almost all prosecutors in the regions were released. And we got rid of the old deputies from the General Prosecutor from the previous Prosecutor General.”
The prosecutor insisted to reporters that he felt no pressure from either the Ukrainian government or the U.S. government to sway his investigations into Burisma.
“Not a single foreign or Ukrainian official or politician has called me or tried to influence my decisions regarding specific criminal cases,” he said.
