Topic: WorldNetDaily
Bob Unruh uncritically wrote in an Aug. 25 WorldNetDaily article:
Viktor Shokin is the prosecutor in Ukraine that Joe Biden, as vice president and in charge of Ukraine relations for Barack Obama, demanded be fired.
Biden later bragged about it:
The situation that developed was that the U.S. was working to help Ukraine eliminate corruption, and one of Shokin's targets was Burisma, a gas company that was paying Joe Biden's son, Hunter, $1 million a year, ostensibly to be on its board but, as evidence suggests, allegedly to get rid of investigations.
The U.S. had concluded Shokin was making progress, but Joe Biden abruptly overruled that conclusion, insisting Shokin be removed, and threatened Ukraine with the loss of a billion dollars of American aid if he was not fired.
He was.
Now, in a coming interview reported to be lined up by Fox News this weekend, Shokin charges that Joe and Hunter Biden did take bribes.
Those bribes already have been documented in an FBI report that said a trusted confidential source confirmed they happened, $5 million to Joe and $5 million to Hunter.
A report Friday in the Daily Mail cites the coming interview, and clips that it obtained from that.
The report said Shokin described the Bidens as the ones guilty of "corruption," and said they took "bribes" from Burisma.
"I do not want to deal in unproven facts. But my firm personal conviction is that yes, this was the case. They were being bribed," Shokin explained, according to the Daily Mail report.
In fact, Shokin is not telling the truth -- he was fired in part because he wasn't investigating Burisma, not because he was (and, in fact, Burisma did not want Shokin fired); he also refused to prosecute any members of the government of former Ukranian president Viktor Yankunovych and was widely viewed as not doing his job. And it wasn't just Biden who sought to fire him; much of the internatoinal community, including more than 100 members of the Ukranian parliament, also wanted Shokin fired.
The only attempt Unruh made to present a balanced view of Shokin was a single paragraph in which he noted that the Daily Mail story reported that "Biden's White House is accusing Fox of 'giving a 'platform to lies'" with the interview.'" But Unruh made no effort to detail those lies.
IUnruh repeated the dubious pro-Shokin narrative again in a Sept. 8 article that hyped how "a memo now has emerged that confirmed the European Union had reached internal consensus that prosecutor Viktor Shokin's office was meeting established goals for fighting corruption and organized crime." Unruh omitted that many other officials wanted Shokin fired for lack of progress against corruption, repeated the falsehood that Shoking was "investigating the Burisma company," and he again failed to detail the lies Shokin told in his Fox News interview.
