The Washington Post on Monday assailed Fox News over a report that prompted Republican outrage, and that the newspaper’s fact-checker determined lacked context.
A report by the conservative network about a 2015 email chain that predated then Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine in 2015 and which Fox said showed he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid if Ukrainian government officials did not fire their top prosecutor angered several GOP lawmakers.
But according to Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler, the story is another example of how the "Hunter Biden saga apparently can be endlessly recycled for maximum impact."
According to critics of the president, the email chain revealed the "ultimate purpose" of Hunter Biden’s involvement with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, which was to block investigations of the company's owner.
"The sequence of events that led to the firing of Viktor Shokin, and the subsequent comments by then-Vice President Biden, raise serious concerns as to what machinations were really at play — and were purposefully concealed from the American people," Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who sits on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, told Fox News. "No matter how you slice Hunter Biden’s involvement, it screams public corruption at the highest levels and must be fully investigated."
Kessler acknowledged that then-Vice President Biden's 2015 trip to Ukraine was to pressure Ukraine into firing the prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, by threatening to withhold aid, which eventually led to Shokin's firing.
"But whether he was a shakedown artist operating at the behest of his son depends on whether Shokin was viewed as an impediment to investigating Burisma. Shokin has since claimed he was ousted because he was getting too tough on Burisma, but the available evidence shows the opposite is true," Kessler writes.
Kessler contends that as vice president and as the Obama administration’s "point person on Ukraine," Biden didn't have the power "to implement policy as he wished."
"Still, it was probably ill-advised for Biden’s son to take a well-paying job with a company that intersected with Biden’s policy brief," writes Kessler.
Read the full fact check over at The Washington Post.