Roughly everyone in America has heard some version of the Burisma/Biden backstory.
But briefly: in March of 2016 then-Vice President Joe Biden delivered a blustering speech in which he threatened to withhold foreign aid from Ukraine if that country didn’t fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.
Shokin, the so-called “Diamond Prosecutor,” was shockingly corrupt, and it was the consensus of the entire US government, along with our Western European allies and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that Shokin had to go.
In 2017, he repurposed the lie for Joe Biden.
This time, the story was that Biden had gotten Shokin fired to protect Burisma, a company which employed Hunter Biden as a board member.
In reality, Shokin had let the investigation of Burisma go dormant by 2016.
But that didn’t stop Rudy Giuliani, then Donald Trump’s lawyer, from spending 2019 traipsing around Ukraine trying to prove that this fabrication was true
— or at least to find someone willing to say it was true so he could dirty up Biden and ensure his loss in 2020.
Unsurprisingly, Shokin was willing to play ball with Rudy as he tried to make fetch happen.
But so were a whole host of other Ukrainians, many of whom had ties to the Kremlin.
One of them was Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker, who was photographed showing Giuliani “evidence” in December 2019.
(Source: Derkach’s press office)
And here’s how Donald Trump’s own Treasury Department referred to Rudy’s buddy when it announced in September 2020 that it was sanctioning him for election interference:
🔸Derkach, a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services. Derkach has directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the upcoming 2020 US presidential election. […]
🔸From at least late 2019 through mid-2020, Derkach waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning US officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election, spurring corruption investigations in both Ukraine and the United States designed to culminate prior to election day.
The announcement went on to note that “between May and July 2020, Derkach released edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit US officials.”
And that is where #Smirnov comes in...
