Several officials in Ukraine have indicated that the government is likely to reopen investigations into corruption, including the gas company that employed Hunter Biden, the son of President Trump’s potential 2020 challenger Joe Biden.
The potential investigation into the company is unlikely to go as far as Trump and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, want because it would focus on corruption in Ukraine and not in the U.S.
“We are trying ultimately to reset the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, to speed up the reform,” Kirill Timoshenko, deputy head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine, told the Daily Beast on Tuesday.
Timoshenko was referencing a new law signed by President Volodymyr Zelensky that seeks to crack down on prosecutorial corruption in Ukraine. A team of independent prosecutors is expected to look into whether past investigations into powerful oligarchs that were handled appropriately. Some of those investigations were quietly shut down after prosecutors were allegedly paid off.
Over the years, prosecutors had opened and dropped two investigations into Burisma Holdings, which employed Hunter Biden as a board member when his father was vice president.
Valentin Nalyvaichenko, a former head of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency and a member of Ukraine’s parliament, said he expects those cases to be looked at again — though not because of Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to do so, but whether Burisma’s founder Mykola Zlochevsky, who was previously Ukraine’s minister of natural resources, had paid off prosecutors to end the investigations.
Trump and his allies have questioned whether the elder Biden pushed for the resignation of the prosecutor investigating Burisma in order to help his son. As vice president, Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if Ukraine did not fire its top prosecutor, who had been accused of corruption and was investigating the gas company.
The potential investigations also have the potential to backfire on Trump. Nalyvaichenko said the former top prosecutor should be investigated for his communication with Trump’s allies “for vindictive purposes.” He said payments to Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort should also be looked into.
