Topic: Newsmax
Mark Swanson played dutiful stenographer for an Aug. 27 Newsmax article:
The former Ukrainian prosecutor general at the center of the Hunter Biden-Burisma scandal said he was fired as a result of a pressure campaign brought by the Obama administration, specifically at the “insistence of the then-Vice President Joe Biden.”
Viktor Shokin told Fox News on Saturday night that he was fired “because I was investigating Burisma.”
Shokin, through a translator, dropped the bombshell remarks during an interview on “One Nation.”
Shokin took it one step further, adding that it’s his belief that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden took bribes. It’s only a belief because Shokin was fired before he could investigate further to prove it, he said.
"Had I continued to oversee the Burisma investigation, we would have found the facts about the corrupt activities that they were engaging in," Shokin told Fox News. "That included both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer and others."
[...]
Shokin said he was forced out in March 2016, fired by then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, over pressure from Biden’s office, ostensibly for allowing corruption in the government and his own office with impunity.
Joe Biden made the demand in a December 2015 trip to Ukraine, threatening to withhold $1 billion in aid unless Shokin was fired.
That was followed by more stenography the next day in an article by Nicole Wells:
Former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland told Newsmax on Monday that with former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin speaking out, hopefully "the final shoe has now dropped" on the Bidens.
"I was in the meeting [with] then-Vice President [Joe] Biden at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and he bragged and he said, 'Well, I told the Ukrainian government unless they fired that special investigator they were going to lose a billion dollars in aid,'" McFarland told "The Chris Salcedo Show." "Everybody in the audience went, 'Ha ha ha,' and Biden said, 'And they fired him right away.' And I'm thinking, Really? Is the vice president of the United States really admitting that he interfered with a bribery investigation in Ukraine?"
Speaking through an interpreter, Shokin told Fox News on Saturday night he was fired "because I was investigating Burisma," specifically at the "insistence of the then-Vice President Joe Biden."
[...]
"If you look back at the timeline, the first thing that they said at the 2020 election, when the Hunter Biden laptop came out, the story was well, it was all Russian disinformation," she said. "And then when that turned out not to be the case, well, it was just Hunter Biden. Joe knew nothing about it. Well now, when it turns out that's not the case – Joe Biden was in the meetings, he was on the speakerphone – now their new version is, well, he may have known about it, and Hunter may have taken the money, but it didn't affect policy."
Neither Swanson nor Wells did any fact-checking for their respective articles, and they really should ave, because Shokin can't be trusted. As others have pointed out, there were calls for Shokin to be fired -- not only by Biden but also from top Republicans and the international community -- not because he was investigating corruption but, rather, because he was not investigating it. Further, such demands are in line with how U.S. foreign policy is conducted, which is often conditioned on countries taking certain actions.
Newsmax is not exactly enhancing its reputation as a credible media outlet by uncritically repeating false claims.
