Biden Pressured the Ukraine on Another Matter — to Vote against Israel

Photo Credit: gpo

{Originally posted to the Emet m’Tsiyon website}

Senator Joe Biden –a Democrat– is at the center of an energetic effort by his party’s members of the House of Representatives to impeach President Trump. The impeachment effort focuses on a phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, the new president of the Ukraine. Without reviewing the Democrats’ charges against Trump, we point out that President Trump and his supporters such as Rudy Giuliani, former US Attorney in New York City and former mayor of New York, have accused Biden of pressuring the previous Ukrainian leadership –before Zelensky’s election– to dismiss a prosecutor who was investigating a Ukrainian company, Burisma, an energy company, in which Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board of directors. Now just how and why it came to be that Biden Junior was appointed to the Board of a Ukrainian energy concern when he had little or no expertise in the energy field [oil and gas, etc] nor did he know the Ukrainian or Russian languages, is a matter of great and relevant curiosity. Maybe somebody at the company, Burisma, thought that having the younger Biden on the Board would give the company or maybe the government of Ukraine, a certain influence in Washington on policy making in the energy field or in regard to Burisma in particular or in favor of the Ukrainian government of that time, approximately 2014-2016. Young Biden was supposed to be paid $50,000 per month by Burisma for his services on the Board.

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An interesting question. And did Joe Biden pressure the Ukrainian govt to dismiss a prosecutor investigating Burisma? Biden did boast about successfully pressuring or intimidating or blackmailing the Ukrainian leadership of the time in a public speech which was delivered, as far as I know, before the Council on Foreign Relations, an influential and prestigious US organization. A video on the internet shows Biden boasting of his successful extortion of the Ukrainian govt: I gave them six hours [to dismiss the offending prosecutor or US loan guarantees in the amount of $1.5 billion would be withheld].

Interesting questions but be they as they may, I intend now to show that Biden applying pressure to the Ukraine was his practice in his capacity as President Obama’s designated liaison between his administration and the Ukrainian govt. Hence Biden was in a good position to apply pressure to the Ukraine and indeed he was responsible for dealing with the Ukraine under Obama and thus his relations with the country had a certain official status.

In fact, in the last month of Obama’s presidency in 2016 late in December, Biden served his boss, Obama, in threatening the Ukraine on another matter, the UN Security Council res. 2334, which was a very anti-Israel resolution, essentially saying that Jews/Israelis had no right to live across the 1949 Green Line, even in Jerusalem in places, neighborhoods, where Jews had lived before 1947. This episode seems to support the Trump-Giuliani version of events.

My post on Biden and Obama’s role in pressuring the Ukraine on UN SC res. 2334 is here.