Former Vice President Joe Biden, now a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, has locked into a specific story about the controversy in Ukraine.
He insists that, in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor solely because Biden believed that official was corrupt and inept, not because the Ukrainian was investigating a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, that hired Biden’s son, Hunter, into a lucrative job.
Thereâs just one problem.
Hundreds of pages of never-released memos and documents â many from inside the American team helping Burisma to stave off its legal troubles â conflict with Bidenâs narrative.
And they raise the troubling prospect that U.S. officials may have painted a false picture in Ukraine that helped ease Burismaâs legal troubles and stop prosecutorsâ plans to interview Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
For instance, Burismaâs American legal representatives met with Ukrainian officials just days after Biden forced the firing of the countryâs chief prosecutor and offered âan apology for dissemination of false information by U.S. representatives and public figuresâ about the Ukrainian prosecutors, according to the Ukrainian governmentâs official memo of the meeting. The effort to secure that meeting began the same day the prosecutor’s firing was announced.
In addition, Burismaâs American team offered to introduce Ukrainian prosecutors to Obama administration officials to make amends, according to that memo and the American legal teamâs internal emails.
The memos raise troubling questions:
1.)   If the Ukraine prosecutorâs firing involved only his alleged corruption and ineptitude, why did Burisma’s American legal team refer to those allegations as âfalse information?”
2.)   If the firing had nothing to do with the Burisma case, as Biden has adamantly claimed, why would Burismaâs American lawyers contact the replacement prosecutor within hours of the termination and urgently seek a meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case?
Ukrainian prosecutors say they have tried to get this information to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) since the summer of 2018, fearing it might be evidence of possible violations of U.S. ethics laws. First, they hired a former federal prosecutor to bring the information to the U.S. attorney in New York, who, they say, showed no interest. Then, the Ukrainians reached out to President Trumpâs personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.