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Trump Revives False Narrative on Biden and Ukraine - FactCheck.org

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At a campaign rally in Iowa, President Donald Trump cited an unsubstantiated news reportAs we have reported last year, Biden traveled toBut 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 of a Ukraine gas company called Burisma. He left the board in .In Des Moines, Iowa, on Oct. 14, Trump “explosive documents” published earlier that day by the New York Post 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 investigating his son and the company that his son worked for.”As&nbsp;, there’s no evidence Hunter Biden was being investigated.The president made this line of attack against Biden a central campaign theme last year — until a alleged Trump had pressured newly elected Ukrainian PresidentUndeterred, the president at the Iowa rally cited unverified emails allegedly sent and received by Hunter Biden that had been obtained by the New York Post from Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, as evidence that “Joe Biden has been blatantly lying about his involvement in his son’s corrupt business dealings.”But the Post story and Hunter Biden’s emails — which may or may not be authentic — don’t support Trump’s claims.In one of several stories on Hunter Biden, the New York Post a “smoking-gun email” that it claims proves the Democratic presidential nominee helped his son and Burisma. The story is based on a that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent to Hunter Biden to “thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.” We have no way to verify that the email is authentic.The Biden campaign “no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place” because it wasn’t on Biden’s schedule. Of course, that isn’t evidence a meeting didn’t occur — but the email (if authentic) isn’t evidence that a meeting did occur, either. New York&nbsp;Post“There was no meeting. Period. I was in all of the Vice President’s meetings that touched on Ukraine, and I’d never heard of this guy until now,” Mike Carpenter, who was Biden’s lead adviser for Ukraine at the time, said in a statement provided to us by the campaign. “This has all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.”We asked the Biden campaign about the authenticity of the emails and the claim that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden, and it referred us to Hunter Biden’s attorney. We will update this story if we get a response.Citing another email from that same story, Trump said that “the same Ukrainian energy executive even sent Hunter an email saying quote ‘we urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence.’ In other words, Hunter was being paid for access to his vice president father who was specifically put in charge of Ukraine and Russia.”Trump is referring to a May 12, 2014, email Pozharskyi allegedly sent to Hunter Biden that asked for “advice on how you could use your influence” to help Burisma. Again, we don’t know if the email is authentic, but even so, the email isn’t evidence that Hunter Biden agreed to use his “influence” with his father to help Burisma. And it certainly isn’t evidence that Joe Biden did anything to help Burisma.by the New York Post published the same day included an April 13, 2014, memo purportedly written by Hunter Biden to one of his partners, Devon Archer. The New York Post says in the memo Hunter Biden “repeatedly mentioned ‘my guy’ while apparently referring to then-Vice President Joe Biden.”The memo said: “The announcement of my guys [sic] upcoming travels should be characterized as part of our advice and thinking- but what he will say and do is out of our hands.” It was written about a week before Biden, as vice president, visited Kyiv, where he talked about anti-corruption efforts during a with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk in the wake of the Ukrainian revolution.Biden’s April 22, 2014, press conference came“Ukrainians have also made clear that after an era of staggering public theft — not debt, public theft — that they will no longer accept corruption from public officials,” Biden said at the press conference. “Your former leader had to run in hiding for fear that after everyone saw the excesses to which his theft had taken him and others. The fact of the matter is I’m of the view — and it’s presumptuous to ever tell another man what his country thinks — but I’m of the view that Ukrainians east, west, north and south are just sick and tired of the corruption.”Under the new regime,“Ukraine has had a long line of prosecutors whose function has not been to enforce the law, but to perform the political function of selectively prosecuting political enemies and to hold out the threat of prosecution in order to secure political loyalty and compliance. Shokin was precisely that kind of prosecutor,”, an associate professor at American University’s School of International Service, told us in an email for a last year. “He would open cases as a way of holding the threat of prosecution over a business, but he did not actually prosecute cases.”BidenUkraine’s new leadership that Shokin needed to be removed, warning that the U.S. would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees until Shokin was replaced. (Biden did not say when he made the threat, but he addressed the Ukrainian Parliament in Kyiv on, and dangled the prospect of future U.S. aid if the country rid itself of the “cancer of corruption.”)“I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Biden recalled in remarks at an event hosted in January 2018 by the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”Trump repeatedly cites Biden’s January 2018 remarks as evidence that the former vice president pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin because he was investigating Burisma.But, as we said, the evidence shows Biden was carrying out U.S. policy, and the United States was not alone in pressuring Ukraine to fire Shokin.It’s important to note, too, that Trump is citing from unverified emails that were allegedly obtained in a bizarre way by his own lawyer. the Post, the emails were found on a laptop that had been abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store, and the shop owner turned it over to the FBI but before doing so he “made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello.”As we earlier this year, Giuliani has visited Ukraine and worked with current and former officials there in an attempt to obtain information damaging to Biden.More recently, we that GiulianiThis, of course, isn’t the first time Trump is using material obtained from questionable sources against a Democratic opponent., then-candidate Trump used hacked materials released by WikiLeaks to repeatedly distort the facts about then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in the final days of the 2016 campaign. In that case, theEarlier this year, the New York Times that the GRU successfully hacked Burisma’s computers.“The timing of the Russian campaign mirrors the G.R.U. hacks we saw in 2016 against the D.N.C. and [Clinton campaign chairman] John Podesta,” Oren Falkowitz, co-founder of Area 1, a security firm that discovered the hacking attempts, told the Times. “Once again, they are stealing email credentials, in what we can only assume is a repeat of Russian interference in the last election.”We don’t know at this point how Giuliani obtained emails and documents that purportedly belong to Hunter Biden.&nbsp;But we do know that they don’t support Trump’s baseless accusations against Joe Biden.Updated, Oct. 16: We added a comment from Mike Carpenter, who was Biden’s lead adviser for Ukraine.&nbsp;This fact check is available at IFCN’s 2020 US Elections FactChat #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Clickfor more.Ask FactCheckHave a question?

At a campaign rally in Iowa, President Donald Trump cited an unsubstantiated news reportAs we have reported last year, Biden traveled toBut 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 of a Ukraine gas company called Burisma. He left the board in .In Des Moines, Iowa, on Oct. 14, Trump “explosive documents” published earlier that day by the New York Post to revive his widely discredited claim that Biden “went to Ukraine and threatened to withhold $1...

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Trump Revives False Narrative on Biden and Ukraine - FactCheck.org

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