Mykola Zlochevsky is the (allegedly) corrupt owner of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas provider. Hunter Biden accepted a position on the board of directors with Burisma in April of 2014. By August of the same year, Vitaly Yurema, prosecutor general of Ukraine at the time, opened an official investigation of Zlochevsky and Burisma. By February 2015, Yurema had been replaced by a man named Viktor Shokin. Only four months later, U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt allegedly warned Shokin to "handle the Biden investigation with kid gloves."

Apparently Shokin didn't listen so good, or maybe Pyatt didn't tell him eight or nine times that he was supposed to clear Burisma and Hunter Biden of any potential wrongdoing. In either event, Joe Biden wasn't happy, because in March of 2016, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. foreign aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was fired within the next six hours. How do we know this? Why, Joe told us himself.

Biden had the audacity to brag about it during a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. He boasted, "[I told the Ukrainians,] 'You're not getting the billion. I'm gonna be leaving here in six hours, and if the prosecutor [Shokin] is not fired, you're not getting the money. Well, son of a b----, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid."

Who was Shokin's "solid" replacement? Yuriy Lutsenko, who subsequently declared there was "no evidence of wrongdoing" by the Bidens and closed the investigation only ten months after taking over the job. According to Lutsenko, there isn't a law against a company paying a board member more than fifty thousand dollars a month (CNBC claims that it was $83,000 per month) to a man who knew nothing about the energy business, doesn't speak the language, and never even set foot in the country to attend a couple of board meetings in Europe each year.

The evidence is indisputably clear and incontrovertible, in the form of a videotaped confession to an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations. One billion dollars in U.S. aid (quid) was offered on condition (pro) that Shokin, the prosecutor allegedly investigating Burisma, be fired (quo). The replacement clears the case.

Cui bono? Who benefits? Lutsenko gets a plum job. The Ukrainian government gets another billion dollars in U.S. foreign aid. Hunter Biden gets three million bucks for about a week's worth of work spread over five years. Joe Biden gets the benefit of having Hunter's corrupt business deal swept under the rug. Everybody wins...except the U.S. taxpayer, of course.

The American people have been asked to believe that Joe Biden demanded that Shokin be fired because he wasn't aggressively investigating Burisma. We have been told there is nothing wrong or unusual about an American citizen who happens to be the son of a powerful politician being paid millions of dollars by a foreign business with economic and political interests directly related to the United States for essentially a "do-nothing" job. We the people are expected to believe that the actions (and specific threats) of Hunter Biden's influential and politically connected father had nothing at all to do with shutting down the investigation of Burisma.

Frankly, it is ludicrous even to suggest that Joe Biden wanted Burisma investigated more thoroughly, because if that was true, why didn't he complain when Lutsenko shut down the investigation only ten months after Shokin had been fired?

How stupid do the liberal media elitists think we are? Laughably, the legal eagles at the NYU School of Law would have us believe that Biden was on an "anti-corruption" campaign against Ukraine that may have harmed his son's company. Try this thought experiment: change the name of the people involved from "Biden" to "Trump," and simply imagine what the headlines would be if Donald Trump had threatened to withhold foreign aid from Ukraine to keep Eric Trump from being investigated for corruption. Pundits wouldn't just be clamoring for Trump's impeachment; they would probably be calling for his public execution, clamoring to hang him for treason or perhaps even to burn him at the stake.

Yet the media have been working overtime to convince the American public that there was absolutely nothing wrong with Hunter Biden "earning" millions of dollars from a Ukrainian company without even setting foot in Ukraine. Reuters reported that "[Rudy] Giuliani has alleged, without providing evidence, that Joe Biden pushed for the firing of Ukraine's top prosecutor to end an investigation into Burisma and Zlochevsky in order to protect his son." FactCheck.org, Bloomberg, and pretty much all the other lamestream media outlets all reported that there was nothing illegal, wrong, or improper about Hunter Biden getting paid $83,000 per month to do nothing by a foreign company being investigated for corruption that involves the theft of U.S. foreign aid money. Nothing to see here; move along.

Which part of the allegation was not supported by evidence? Joe Biden claimed that he not only pushed for the firing of Shokin, but absolutely insisted upon it and threatened to withhold U.S. foreign aid unless his demands were immediately met. Biden didn't specifically give a reason for why he wanted the prosecutor fired, but is it easier to believe that he was trying to find corruption in the company paying his son millions of dollars to do nothing or that he wanted to protect his son and the income stream produced by that corrupt company? Biden's defenders have claimed that Shokin himself was corrupt and not investigating Burisma, but the fact is that Joe Biden's preferred choice, Yuriy Lutsenko, shut down the investigation and cleared everybody involved without solving the mystery of the missing foreign aid money.

Why does Burisma need to be investigated? Deputy assistant secretary of state George Kent just testified in the so-called impeachment hearings that Zlochevsky and Burisma need to be investigated because they had stolen billions of dollars and possibly bribed a prosecutor to shut down the investigation that dated back to the period when Zlochevsky served as minister of ecology and natural resources and gave his own business government licenses and contracts.

Yet, astonishingly, Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of an alleged Ukrainian "Anti-Corruption Action Center," made an extraordinary claim to Radio Free Europe: "ironically, Joe Biden asked Shokin to leave because the prosecutor failed to pursue the Burisma investigation, not because Shokin was tough and active with the case."

Okay, so everybody wants us to believe that Shokin wasn't tough enough or doing the job...but who in his right mind would claim that Lutsenko is any tougher?

AUTHOR’S NOTE: An article written by John Solomon published in The Hill reported that Daria Kaleniuk and her organization AntAC were funded by Barack Obama’s State Department and the International Renaissance Foundation, a George Soros organization. It makes sense Kaleniuk would claim Biden was getting tougher on corruption by replacing Shokin when the opposite appears to be true. It isn’t clear that Lutsenko is corrupt, however, because he complained that Ambassador Yovanovich verbally issued a "do not prosecute" list included Hunter Biden and Burisma that apparently came indirectly from Barack Obama himself.

John Leonard writes novels, books, and the occasional article for American Thinker. John also blogs at his website southernprose.com, where he may be contacted.

Image: Marc Nozell via Flickr.