Thread by @kurteichenwald

1. In the imaginary world of Trump and the GOP, former Ukranian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was a hero who tried to fight corruption - particularly against Burisma and Biden - but was undermined by the corrupt Bidens.

So, what did the Ukrainians think of Shokin?...

2...Everything I am about to show you came out, written by Ukranians, before Biden said a word.

Shokin was a corrupt as hell, directly involved in blocking reforms to stop corruption....

3...more than a hundred members of the Ukranian parliament called for Shokin to be fired because of his corruption...again, before Biden said a word...

4...when faced with this reality of demands from Parliament that he be forced out - before Biden said a word - Shokin started arresting political opponents. Hennadiy Korban, the leader of the UKROP party, was prosecuted on suspicion of having committed a wide range of crimes...

5...followed by the prosecution by Shokin's office of another party lawmaker, Ihor Mosiychuk. The word went out to all of the lawmakers fighting for Shokin to be thrown out - oppose him and be prosecuted or shut up. (Note: The same criminal mindset of Donald Trump and the GOP)...

6...still, some brave lawmakers kept up their fight to upend the corruption of Shokin - the current hero of the Republican Party...

7...the same happened to those ethical prosecutors who tried to take down the corruption promoted by Shokin - these ethical prosecutors exposed wrongdoing, so Shokin prosecuted them. He also launched criminal investigations of anticorruption fighters ...

8...if you can't keep up with that - two young prosecutors found another prosecutor with loads of gold, cash, etc. He was arrested. So Shokin arrested them.....

9...now, you may wonde, if he was so corrupt, why was he investigating Hunter Biden? Simple answer: He wasnt. This is simply made up, a fiction, that is now being promoted by Shokin himself who is trying to align himself with Trump and rehabilitate himself in Ukraine as honest...

10...so, a dash of more reality. Again, there was never a Hunter Biden investigation, never a Joe Biden investigation, never a Burisma investigation. There was an investigation of Mykola Zlochevsky, founder of Burisma, for acts he took when he was government official....

11...the GOP argument here would be like saying, if Rex Tillerson was accused of taking bribes when he was secretary of state, any investigation was of Steven Albert Kandarian, a director of Exxon Mobil. The abject absurdity here is beyond description....

12...but one more thing. Even though it was an investigation of Mykola Zlochevsky for his acts as a government official - and not of Burisma or Biden - guess who it was who blocked the investigation of Zlochevsky? Come on, you can guess..It was SHOKIN! The man held up by the...

13...GOP as the hero, the man who protected those people who were corrupt so that he could go after the people who fought corruption.

The way the Zlochevsky investigation began is that Britain was running a criminal inquiry, and sought documents from Ukraine....

14...but those documents were never produced, so the British inquiry died in its tracks. And the person responsible for those documents not being turned over? The GOP hero, Viktor Shokin...

15...so by trying to force out Shokin, the West, the IMF, the EU and Biden, I guess, were fighting for the end of corrupt prosecutions, which would mean that the former government official, Zlochevsky, was at greater risk of prosecution.....

16...now, Fox News, the GOP and other immoral actors are holding up Shokin as the hero of Ukraine. Read how Trump described Shokin for Zelensky in his fantasy representation of reality - in which Shokin is the good guy - and how the people fighting corruption were the bad guys...

17...so, what does this say? It says that the President of the United States is just as corrupt as Shokin, that he is seeking political prosecutions of his challengers, that the GOP is joining him in this horrific endeavor, that we are communicating to Ukraine that, unless...

18...they return to the corruption that has nearly wrecked the country through political prosecutions, that we will leave Ukranians fighting for their homeland at the mercy of Russia. Our country has become the evil one, evil beyond measure. And it is now up to EU and...

19...the IMF to try to hold together the anti-corruption efforts of Ukraine, to tell that nation that, no, the corruption of the United States should not be seen as an excuse to resume corruption, that the United States - contrary to Trump's lies - is not the largest....

20...provider of support to Ukraine, and if they resume down the corrupt path encouraged by the United States, they will lose far more support from the rest of the world than they will from us.

I have never been more ashamed of our country. Our ignorance, our tribalism....

21..our inability to rise above partisanship, has left us a shell of what we had been. I dont know if America can recover from Trump & the GOP, the corruption, the lies, the abandonment of our global principles. We all can only hope its possible. And it starts by knowing reality.

22...and one last bit, a couple of comments, about the reality of Shokin, the hero of the GOP, written just after he lost his position as Prosecutor General. Written by Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at Atlantic Council & author of “Ukraine: What Went Wrong & How to Fix It"...

23....and to sum it all up, Åslund wrote this about the new hero of the GOP and Trump.