Jim Jordan Makes It Clear: The Biden Impeachment Inquiry Rests Entirely On a Widely Debunked Conspiracy Theory

As Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) officially announced an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden this week, House Republicans made the rounds in the media to defend the move. In doing so, many of them revived a long-debunked conspiracy theory regarding then Vice President Joe Biden and Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin.

“I think there are four, four key facts, four central facts that are at the heart of this issue,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) told Fox & Friends on Wednesday morning, adding:

The first is Hunter Biden was put on the Burisma board. Second, he was put on that board with no qualifications. Third, Burisma, asked him, can you weigh in with DC to relieve the pressure we’re under from the prosecution, from the prosecutor here in Ukraine?

And fourth, Joe Biden did just that. He leveraged our tax money to get the prosecutor fired. And that fourth fact is, is validation of what the confidential human source said in the 1023 form. So that is what is central to this case.

Jordan made clear that the impeachment inquiry, which he will lead in part as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, rests on those “four facts” and “that’s why the speaker has said we’re moving to this phase of our constitutional duty to do oversight of the executive branch.”

While the first three of Jordan’s “facts” may all very well prove to be true (no one is contending Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Burisma were merit-based), the fourth fact has long been debated, investigated, and ultimately debunked.

The issue with Jordan’s claim that Biden got Shokin fired to benefit his son or as a result of his son’s business dealings stems from the fact that Shokin was widely viewed as being part of the Ukrainian legacy of corruption. Both U.S. policy, dubbed inside the Obama administration “big hugs and little punches,” and EU policy at the time was to apply pressure to have him removed.

“Joe Biden’s actions were consistent with bipartisan US policy, which sought to remove the prosecutor because he wasn’t doing enough to crack down on corruption – including at Burisma,” noted a CNN fact check.

“The Obama administration, Senate Republicans, US allies, the International Monetary Fund, and Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, among others, had all made clear that they were displeased with the performance of Viktor Shokin, who became Ukraine’s prosecutor general in 2015,” the fact check noted, concluding:

Replacing Shokin would’ve ramped up scrutiny of Burisma, not shut it down. It is not even clear how aggressively Shokin was investigating Zlochevsky or Burisma at the time Joe Biden pushed for Shokin’s firing.

For those unwilling to accept CNN’s fact check, Christopher Miller, one of the foremost Western experts on the ground in Ukraine during this period, wrote in September 2019 that “Shokin himself was the biggest obstacle standing in the way of” an investigation into Burisma.

Miller added, “There is a long list of Western organizations, governments, and diplomats, as well as Ukrainian anti-corruption groups, that wanted to see Shokin fired. They include the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, the U.S. government, foreign investors, and Ukrainian advocates of reform.”

None of this is to say that Hunter Biden’s association with Burisma did not raise eyebrows at the time his father was working on behalf of the Obama administration to combat corruption. “The credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings,” wrote James Risen in the New York Times in December of 2015, reporting on Biden’s pressure campaign to curb corruption in Ukraine.

Video of Biden bragging in 2018 about getting Shokin fired by threatening to withhold U.S. aid has become an often-cited piece of evidence by people like Jordan pushing this conspiracy theory. In the clip, Biden says, “We’re leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

The Washington Post noted this week that Biden “called an audible” en route to Ukraine, according to Obama administration sources, by tying U.S. aid (in the form of a $1 billion loan guarantee) to Shokin’s removal, but that the “Obama White House was firmly on board with the plan” once Biden was in Kyiv.

The Biden clip came to prominence during Trump’s first impeach trial after he was taped telling the Ukrainian president he would withhold U.S. military aid to fight off Russian-backed insurgents if he did not publicly announce an investigation into the Bidens.

“The Ukrainian Government just said they weren’t pressured at all during the ‘nice’ call. Sleepy Joe Biden, on the other hand, forced a tough prosecutor out from investigating his son’s company by threat of not giving big dollars to Ukraine. That’s the real story!” Tweeted Trump in September of 2019.

Trump and his allies pushed this claim repeatedly both as a means of combatting impeachment and smearing Biden, his then-potential 2020 presidential rival. Furthermore, in March 2021 the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russia engaged in election interference by actively working with Trump allies to promote such claims.

“We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.,” the assessment said, adding:

The primary effort revolved around a narrative-that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014-alleging corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other US officials and Ukraine.

Russian intelligence “relied on Ukraine-linked proxies and these proxies’ networks-including their US contacts-to spread this narrative,” concluded the U.S. intelligence agencies.

So, while the GOP-led impeachment inquiry certainly has a bone to pick with Hunter Biden, this particular allegation linking Hunter to his father, pushed by Jordan as well as Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) this week, has long since been put to bed and shown to have grown out of both Trump’s political operation and Russia’s longstanding intelligence operation to divide Americans and undermine the legitimacy of U.S. democracy.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.