WASHINGTON—Judicial Watch announced Sept. 26 that it has filed suit in federal court seeking to force the State Department to release all official U.S. government documents related to the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor, as demanded by former Vice President Joe Biden.
(Article by Mark Tapscott republished from TheEpochTimes.com)
The nonprofit government watchdog’s suit was in response to the government’s failure to respond to a May 7 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for:
- Any and all records regarding, concerning, or related to Viktor Shokin’s investigation of Mykola Zolchevsky, and Shokin’s resignation at Ukraine’s Prosecutor General.
- Any and all records of communication between any official, employee, or representative of the Department of State and any official, employee, or representative of the Office of the Vice President regarding Shokin.
Postal records confirmed that the Office of Programs and Information Services, which handles FOIA requests sent to the State Department, received the Judicial Watch request. The department didn’t respond within the time limits set by federal law, according to Judicial Watch.
The FOIA was filed after a video became public of Biden telling a Jan. 23, 2018, conference at the Council on Foreign Relations of his threatening to withhold more than $1 billion in U.S. assistance to the government of Ukraine if officials didn’t fire Shokin before Biden departed the country in six hours.
Shokin was at the time conducting a corruption investigation of Burisma, a Ukraine energy company that was paying Biden’s son, Hunter, $50,000 a month in consulting fees, according to media reports.
“I remember going over and convincing our team that we should be providing loan guarantees, and I went over to Kyiv for, I guess, the 12th or 13th time, and I was supposed to announce there was another $1 billion loan guarantee,” Biden told the conference.
“And I had gotten a commitment from [then-Ukraine President Petro] Poroshenko and [then-Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy] Yatsenyuk that they would take action against [Shokin], and they didn’t.
“So they were walking out to the press conference, and I said, ‘We’re not gonna give you the billion dollars.’ They said, ‘You have no authority, you’re not the president.’ The president said, I said, ‘Call him.’
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