Just the News has obtained some blockbuster memos under the Freedom of Information Act pursuant to litigation related to Ukraine, Burisma, and then-Vice President Joe Biden withholding aid to Ukraine. Those memos blow up the narrative that Biden has been trying to sell us for years — that the reason he was pushing for the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin and threatening to withhold aid to the country was because of the corruption.

The emails reveal that a U.S. task force created by then-President Barack Obama found that "Ukraine ha[d] made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third [U.S. loan] guarantee" weeks before VP Biden's now infamous trip to Kyiv.

Just weeks before then-Vice President Joe Biden took the opposite action in late 2015, a task force of State, Treasury and Justice Department officials declared that Ukraine had made adequate progress on anti-corruption reforms and deserved a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee, according to government memos that conflict with the narrative Democrats have sustained since the 2019 impeachment scandal.

“Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee,” reads an Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizing the recommendation of the Interagency Policy Committee (IPC) – a task force created to advise the Obama White House on whether Ukraine was cleaning up its endemic corruption and deserved more Western foreign aid.

In other words, when he was making the threat, he was going around that recommendation and not following the U.S. position on the matter. 

That wasn't all. Just the News found some other memos that further damaged the Biden narrative. 

That included a message to the Ukrainian Prosecutor who Biden was targeting (Shokin) from senior State Department officials inviting him to Washington for a Jan. 2016 strategy session and a personal note saying that they were "impressed" with his office's work. That doesn't exactly sound like they thought there was a problem. 

Another memo showed that U.S. officials were getting pressure from Burisma to make the allegations disappear and "feared the energy firm had made two bribery payments in Ukraine as part of an effort to get cases settled." That may tailor to those reports about alleged bribery to the Bidens. 

On top of that, a State Department official blamed Hunter Biden for hurting their anti-corruption effort because of his efforts with Burisma. 

File

"The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter's presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine b/c Ukrainians heard one message from us and then saw another set of behavior with the family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules," embassy official George Kent wrote to Yovanovitch in the Nov. 22, 2016, email marked "confidential."

Despite that recommendation from the task force, Biden still made the threat and then followed through by pressuring Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Shokin. But there's evidence there, too, that blows up that Biden narrative again. 

“Despite of the fact that we didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I especially asked him … No, it was the day before yesterday. I especially asked him to resign,” Poroshenko told Biden in an audio tape call from March 2016 that was eventually released by a Ukrainian lawmaker in 2020.

So they had nothing to show that he did anything wrong, yet Poroshenko bent because of the pressure from Biden. 

These documents not only do in Biden's narrative but could also have helped the defense during the Trump impeachment. 

"This new evidence being uncovered and reported by Just The News is incredibly significant," said former New York Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin. "It directly undercuts multiple false narratives that were being pushed by Congressional Democrats, some of their key impeachment witnesses, and Democrat allies in the media."

Jay Sekulow, a lawyer who helped lead Trump's legal team during the impeachment, said he did not believe the defense had access to such memos.

"The fact of the matter is none of these documents were handed over to us," he said. "Our legal team never received documents from the House impeachment. So of course, they're not obligated to in the sense of like in a courtroom. But when you have exculpatory documents, you would think that under just a good faith standards of the House of Representatives would have said, 'You know, here's what we've got.'"

Sekulow continued: "But of course, they weren't going to do that. Because as soon as they did that, everyone knew their narrative was false."

In June 2015, Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland wrote to Shokin, “We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government."

Then in September 2015, the task force concluded that Ukraine had made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee, so they were recommending it. Additionally, the task force memo didn't say anything about firing Shokin or list any further actions to deal with corruption. 

In November 2015, they drew up a draft agreement to deal with the loan guarantee and again said nothing further about Shokin or any corruption. 

Even Joe Biden still seemed on board very early in November. 

“Regarding economic reforms, the Vice President reiterated the U.S. willingness to provide a third $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine contingent on continued Ukrainian progress to investigate and prosecute corruption and ensure that Ukraine's tax reform is consistent with its IMF program,” the memo stated.

But then suddenly everything changed, and when the prosecutors went to Washington in January, they found out that Biden had changed the message in December. This surprised even "whistleblower" Eric Ciaramella, who figured in the Trump impeachment. He said in January that they had been "super impressed" with the group when they came to Washington. 

This just completely takes apart the Biden team narrative. It also fits what Viktor Shokin has been saying for years. 

This should add further fire to the Congressional investigation and the calls to move to an impeachment inquiry. 

(EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece was edited post-publication for clarity.)