Sen. Ron Johnson is working to verify a document that describes an apology for a “misinformation campaign” against fired Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
The answer may come from Blue Star Strategies, a Washington-based consulting firm that represented the interests of Burisma Holdings in the United States, which has become the target of Johnson’s investigation into the Ukrainian gas company and its connection to Joe and Hunter Biden.
Johnson, who is the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, told Fox News’s Martha MacCallum on Wednesday that one question his panel hopes to answer is why Shokin was fired.
“I can’t get that from the U.S. government. I know it was a big explanation that everybody wanted him fired, but there is a document, we have to verify it, but there is a document supposedly contemporaneous that said that the contact by Blue Star to the prosecutor general’s office was all about apologizing for the misinformation campaign conducted against Shokin,” the Wisconsin Republican said.
“Kind of raises some eyebrows, some questions that need to be answered,” he added.
Shokin, who was dismissed in March 2016 after about a year in office by then-President Petro Poroshenko, claims he was ousted because he wanted to investigate the lucrative role Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, had on Burisma’s board from 2014 to 2019.
Republicans have questioned why Burisma gave Hunter a high-paying position on the company board despite him having little experience in the energy sector and a well-documented problem with drug use. President Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and other allies claim Joe Biden improperly used his position as vice president to pressure Ukraine to fire Shokin to protect his son from an investigation into Burisma.
The matter got wrapped up into the impeachment saga after Trump pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens and other Democrats in a July 25 phone call in which he also appeared to praise Shokin and call his removal “unfair,” according to a transcript released by the White House. Democrats cried foul over what they interpreted to be a “quid pro quo.”
At issue was whether the president improperly pressured Ukraine to announce investigations by withholding military aid and dangling the possibility of a White House meeting between the Trump and Zelensky. Trump was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, but he was acquitted by the GOP-led Senate earlier this month. Zelensky himself has repeatedly stated that he felt no pressure from Trump to open an investigation into the Bidens.
The elder Biden, who was leading the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts in Ukraine, threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if Ukraine did not fire its top prosecutor, who was criticized by the West for not doing enough to crack down on corruption. The European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and other allies had the same objective, and Biden was repeating U.S. policy that had been set out by Washington’s ambassador to Kyiv in the preceding months and was briefed by White House staff just ahead of the trip.
Biden says there is no “credibility” to the claims of corruption, but his critics have seized on video of a statement the former vice president made in January 2018, where he boasted to members of a panel hosted by the Council of Foreign Relations that he ordered the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin or the White House would renege on a commitment to provide aid. “I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired,” Biden said.
Ukrainian investigators recently began an inquiry into the former vice president over allegations that he pressured officials into firing a top prosecutor in 2016. The investigation was opened by the State Bureau of Investigations on a court order following a January appeal for action by Shokin.
Johnson revealed publicly on Monday that he intends to schedule a committee meeting to vote on a subpoena for Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomatic aide who worked for Blue Star Strategies, after the firm did not sufficiently respond to his request for documents. Blue Star mentioned Hunter Biden in communications with the State Department in an apparent effort to improve its image in Washington, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
The senator told reporters on Tuesday he hopes to release an interim report in the next couple of months. He argued that the investigation is not “focused” on the Bidens, but suggested voters deserve to have a fuller accounting of the former vice president’s actions as he competes to snag the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in July.
Democrats criticized Johnson for escalating the investigation into the Bidens just as the vice president’s campaign began to gain steam. “I am concerned to see that in the Senate there seems to be a renewed interest in furthering these bogus Russian narratives through the use of their investigative powers. I just think it’s so deeply destructive to be effectively working in concert with Russian propaganda artists,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said.
Biden’s team thanked the Republican senator for doing the campaign “an enormous favor.”
“Senator Johnson just accidentally did us an enormous favor by explicitly admitting that he is abusing congressional authority in a manner that would make the founding fathers spin in their graves,” Biden’s campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said.
