Trump Revives False Narrative on Biden and Ukraine
At a campaign rally in Iowa, President Donald Trump cited an unsubstantiated news report to revive a widely debunked false narrative about Joe Biden’s work in Ukraine on behalf of the Obama administration.
As we have reported more than once last year, Biden traveled to Kyiv as vice president and warned Ukraine’s then-president, Petro Poroshenko, that the U.S. would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees until Ukraine removed its prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, who was widely viewed as corrupt.
At the time, the international community and anti-corruption advocates in Ukraine were also calling for Shokin to be removed from office for his failure to aggressively prosecute corruption.
But Trump has repeatedly distorted the facts about Biden’s work in Ukraine to baselessly accuse his Democratic rival of seeking Shokin’s removal to help his son, Hunter, who at the time was a board member of a Ukraine gas company called Burisma. He left the board in 2019.
In Des Moines, Iowa, on Oct. 14, Trump “explosive documents” published earlier that day by the to revive his widely discredited claim that Biden “went to Ukraine and threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid if they did not fire the prosecutor that was
