There is tons of news about Hunter and Joe Biden’s influence-peddling scheme and the millions of dollars they raked in, in exchange for gaining the ear (and the help of) the Vice President.

Ed wrote a terrific piece earlier today about the revelations from the House Oversight Committee’s release of yet another tranche of documents proving that the Biden family vacuumed up about $20 million in suspect cash, and I suspect that the information we have heard is only the tip of a huge iceberg.

One of the long-known examples of Biden using his influence to shape policy to benefit his son’s clients is his insistence that Ukraine fire a vexatious prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, a company on which Hunter served on the Board.

The Bidens claim that Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor in question, was fired for corruption. In Ukraine, a government official being corrupt is about as shocking as water being wet, and getting fired for being corrupt would be as rare as hen’s teeth. I have no idea how corrupt Shokin was, but I also have no doubt that Shokin was a pain in Burisma’s ass and they wanted him gone.

After then-VP @JoeBiden succeeded in pressuring Ukraine to remove its prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, the next person to hold the job had ties to Hunter Biden.https://t.co/CcOmk8C5pQ

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) August 8, 2023

What I and many other people did not know was that Shokin’s replacement in the position was somebody tied to Hunter Biden and his crew.

That puts a different spin on things. The Washington Examiner has the story.

After then-Vice President Joe Biden succeeded in pressuring Ukraine to remove its prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, the next person to hold the job had ties to Hunter Biden.

Yuri Lutsenko, the prosecutor general who took over for Shokin after his ouster in 2016, had relied on the same lobbyists representing Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its chief executive for years, State Department emails suggest. Hunter Biden personally brought those lobbyists into the Burisma deal in 2015 for the purpose of shutting down investigations of Burisma’s chief executive, according to his own emails.

The connection is newly relevant due to a fresh debate about whether Shokin was actually investigating Burisma at the time Joe Biden pushed to have him removed. That debate was sparked last week by testimony from Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, who said Burisma board members were “fed” a “narrative” in which the Ukrainian prosecutor general did not pose a threat to the company.

I have always been skeptical of the claim that Shokin presented no danger to Burisma and that Hunter Biden was hired as a useful expert on running a business or selling oil. These claims have the same plausibility as the speculation that Donald Trump was a Russian asset going back to the 80s.

None at all. A convenient lie oft repeated.

In 2015, Hunter Biden arranged for Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano of the lobbying firm Blue Star Strategies to begin working for Burisma and its chief executive, Mykola Zlochevsky.

A Burisma executive said “the ultimate purpose” of the contract with Blue Star Strategies would be “to close down for any cases/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine,” using an alternate spelling of Zlochevsky’s first name.

“I trust Sally and Karen implicitly so I believe we are all aligned,” Hunter Biden replied to the Burisma executive, according to an email found on his abandoned laptop.

Internal State Department emails from 10 months later suggest Painter told the State Department that, at the time, she was also representing Lutsenko.

George Kent, at the time a high-level State Department official focused on Eurasian affairs, complained to other high-level State Department officials that Painter had effectively bullied him in a phone call regarding Lutsenko, the Shokin replacement.

Just to be clear on the sequence of events: Hunter Biden gets a sweet gig at Burisma, which was under investigation. Hunter hires lobbyists to get the investigation quashed, and they start harassing the US State Department. Joe Biden gets Viktor Shokin fired. Shokin was replaced by a man tied to the firm Hunter used as a lobbyist to get Burisma out of trouble.

Seems kosher to me. You?

The claim that none of this is connected to the millions of dollars funneled to the son Joe Biden calls “the smartest man I know” is nothing but gaslighting. Donald Trump was said to have sold the country out in exchange for unnamed people renting hotel rooms for a night or two, but Joe Biden did nothing in exchange for millions of dollars flowing to his children and eventually grandchildren.

Yep. Makes sense to me.

Messages and testimony gathered by the Senate Homeland Security Committee and published in a 2020 report show that Blue Star Strategies succeeded in securing at least one meeting with Lutsenko and a Burisma executive, which, according to other emails, they struggled to do under Shokin.

In other words, the prosecutor who replaced Shokin appeared more amenable to the Burisma lobbying efforts than his predecessor, contradicting Democratic claims that Joe Biden’s calls for Shokin’s firing could not be unethical because Shokin was friendlier to Burisma.

Why does it take the Washington Examiner to dig this information up? The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the MSM have billions of dollars at their disposal to do investigative journalism.

Not only do they sit on their hands when they should be digging things up, they actively cover up evidence that is so obvious that a punch in the face would have less impact.

Why? Because they are shills, not journalists.