SurrealPolitiks S01E024 – Yes, They Were Being Bribed

Ukraine is back in the news after former prosecutor Viktor Shokin made an appearance on Fox News’s One Nation with Brian Kilmeade. Kilmeade, normally among the most shameless of pro-Ukraine propagandists, aired the interview last weekend, during which Shokin stated what is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention “Yes, they were being bribed” referring to the Biden family. Shokin was famously fired after Joe Biden, then Vice President and heading up Ukraine foreign policy for the Obama Administration, threatened then President Petro Poroshenko with the loss of a billion US dollars promised in US loan guarantees. Biden would later tell the story to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018 “You don’t fire the prosecutor, you’re not getting the billion dollars” he said. Followed by “Son of a bitch, he got fired”. Dutifully, Western media like the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, all followed up with vague claims of corruption by Shokin, but no evidence or specificity was forthcoming. What was forthcoming was that Shokin had been investigating Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that hired now President Biden’s crackhead son Hunter to be on its board of directors. This despite the fact that Hunter knew nothing about the energy business, did not speak Ukrainian, and had no discernible skill that would warrant him being hired at anything so prestigious as a fast food restaurant in the United States. More recently, JustTheNews.com obtained memos summarizing the findings of the Interagency Policy Committee (IPC) – a task force created to advise the Obama White House on whether Ukraine was cleaning up its endemic corruption and deserved more Western foreign aid. “Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee,” reads an Oct. 1, 2015, memo. Biden threatened to withhold those funds in December of the same year. There was no legitimate basis for doing so, contra the Democrat narrative. In Western media, to the extent this is covered at all, it is framed as evidence of Joe Biden being involved in corrupt practices. This much is so obvious it scarcely warrants mentioning. What is less obvious, and not at all discussed in media, is its direct nexus to the war currently taking place in that region, the Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election, and the role this likely played in the election of 2020. You hear plenty about Russian interference in 2016. Trump is the Siberian Candidate, we are to believe. The Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta and had “bots” helping Trump by calling him a Nazi which is how you win elections in the United States, apparently. But the mark of a successful intelligence operation is its lack thereof. You do not hear about successful intelligence missions because their success is marked by secrecy. You hear about the outcomes all the time, surprise election upsets, other convenient happenings, more coincidences than a reasonable person ought to be comfortable with, but you do not hear about the involvement of the intelligence agencies unless the intelligence agency has failed. Until pretty recently, most Americans would have tol