Bloomberg Puts Rudy Giuliani's Ukrainium-One Lie Out Of Our Misery

Thank you, Bloomberg! And no thanks NYT!

Everything is terrible all the time. And yet , Your Wonkette still managed to find you a Nice Time story for Friday! Who loves you, Baybee?

Today's happy dance is thanks to Bloomberg News, which took Rudy Giuliani's evil little smear campaign against Joe Biden, and dismantled it with careful reporting before it could detonate and launch shrapnel into every nook and cranny of the political ecosystem. Thank you, Bloomberg, for proving that 2020 will not be a rerun of 2016! Maybe tell your pals over at the New York Times, who seem to think that good journalism involves printing lies   as if they might be true. AHEM.  

Rudy Giuliani, who has his own interesting entanglements in Ukraine, has been flogging this Ukrainium One bullshit for a month now. In Rudy's version of events, Vice President Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion of US loan guarantees in 2016 if Ukraine didn't fire its chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Sure there was an international consortium pushing for Shokin's ouster over massive corruption . But Rudy knows that Biden's real motivation was to halt an investigation into his son's Ukrainian client Mykola Zlochevsky, notwithstanding the fact that Shokin's investigation of Zlochevksy had gone dormant more than a year earlier. Nice of Times reporter Ken Vogel to refer to "the Bidens' Ukrainian work" six times in that article where he printed Rudy's bullshit, huh? (Ken's been a happy helper on this Ukraine story since back in his Politico days.)

Everything was all going so well! Rudy even had a crafty plan to use Ukraine to discredit the entire Mueller Report by claiming that Paul Manafort was framed using forged evidence cooked up by Hillary Clinton. And he might have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling Bloomberg kids, who discovered the real forgery was actually Giuliani's documents implicating Joe Biden. Womp womp!

A Ukrainian lawmaker accused his country's top prosecutor of manufacturing a "conspiracy" about U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, adding to a political intrigue playing out from Kiev to Washington.

The lawmaker, Serhiy Leshchenko, said he had been given parts of a letter written by the prosecutor with the intent of currying favor with the Trump administration. The letter was sent by the prosecutor through unofficial channels to President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the lawmaker told journalists on Monday in Kiev as he distributed copies of two pages.

The letter, purportedly written by Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, said that Biden, while U.S. vice president, personally received income from a Ukrainian natural gas company in exchange for "lobbying activities and political support."

Leshchenko accused the prosecutor of attempting to curry favor with the Trump administration by making up lies about Biden. If so, it appears to have backfired spectacularly. By the time Bloomberg tracked him down, the prosecutor was shouting into any available microphone that Hunter Biden never broke any laws and UKRAINE DOESN'T WANT ANY TROUBLE.

Yuriy Lutsenko, the current prosecutor general, said that neither Hunter Biden nor Burisma were now the focus of an investigation. He added, however, that he was planning to offer details to U.S. Attorney General William Barr about Burisma board payments so American authorities could check whether Hunter Biden paid U.S. taxes on the income.

"I do not want Ukraine to again be the subject of U.S. presidential elections," Lutsenko said in an interview Tuesday in his office in Kiev. "Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws -- at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing. A company can pay however much it wants to its board." He said if there is a tax problem, it's not in Ukraine.

Please, Bill Barr, do confirm that Hunter Biden paid all applicable taxes on his company's Ukrainian earnings. And we promise never to elect Hunter Biden for president. Done and done.

And they all lived happily ever after! No, not really. They all lived angrily and wisely ever after, constantly vigilant and taking nothing for granted. They screamed and yelled and banged pots when lies were printed as if they might be true, and they didn't ignore stupid shit assuming that no one could possibly take it seriously. Because they knew from painful experience that the unthinkable could easily become reality, so they never, ever again sat home for a midterm, primary, or the smallest ballot initiative.

Thank you Bloomberg, for this Friday Nice Time. Thank you Daryna Krasnolutska, Stephanie Baker, and Kateryna Choursina for taking Rudy's conspiracy smear out back and putting it out of our misery. It'll probably take him at least a week to regroup and gin up another lie, but until then ....

IT IS NICETIMES, GODDAMMIT!

[ Bloomberg / Bloomberg, again]

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