Read: Nancy Pelosi has had enough

The story begins in spring 2014, when Hunter Biden, then–Vice President Joe Biden’s son, took a seat on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural-gas company, not long after the fall of Kremlin-tied President Viktor Yanukovych. Burisma’s owner was Mykola Zlochevsky, who’d been a minister in the Yanukovych government. In February 2015, Viktor Shokin became Ukraine’s prosecutor general, and said he would investigate Burisma.

But the international community came to view Shokin as too weak on corruption, despite his promises to investigate wrongdoing. The United States, the International Monetary Fund, and others pressured Ukraine to investigate corruption more thoroughly, but Shokin took no serious action. In December 2015, Biden was in Kyiv, where he was scheduled to announce a $1 billion American loan to the Ukrainian government.* Biden told a version of the story himself, in which he condensed the actual sequence of events, at a Council on Foreign Relations event in 2018:

I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him. I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.

To summarize, Biden threatened to withhold aid if the prosecutor wasn’t fired, and he was. Importantly, Biden was not freelancing, but was acting as a representative of President Barack Obama. There’s no evidence that Biden was helping his son. Shokin’s former deputy, who quit in frustration over his boss’s intransigence, told Bloomberg in May that the U.S. wasn’t pushing to drop probes of Burisma. “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky,” he said. “It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.”

In effect, Biden’s pressure to install a tougher prosecutor probably made it more likely, not less, that Burisma would be in the cross hairs. But since then, the Ukrainian government has not produced any evidence of wrongdoing by Burisma, and the current prosecutor general said in May there was none. A Ukrainian interior-minister official told the Daily Beast that though Ukraine has no evidence that either Biden broke the law, the government would investigate further if the U.S. formally requested it. Hunter Biden has left Burisma’s board.

Joe Biden says he did not discuss Burisma substantively with his son, though Hunter Biden told The New Yorker it came up briefly once: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’” Given Hunter Biden’s checkered past, and the political difficulty that he has caused his father, it’s doubtful he really knew what he was doing.