The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations that Joe Biden, while he was vice president of the United States, improperly withheld a loan guarantee and took a bribe to pressure Ukraine into firing prosecutor general Viktor Shokin to prevent a corruption investigation of Ukrainian gas company Burisma and to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who was on the Burisma board.
[27][28] The thesis of the false conspiracy theory asserts that Joe Biden sought the dismissal of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect his son,[25] and that he did it in a quid pro quo manner by trading loan guarantees for the personal favor.
[24] In January 2018, a videotaping by the Council on Foreign Relations shows Biden taking credit for withholding the loan guarantees to have the prosecutor fired.
Prosecutors also said Smirnov is a dual U.S. and Israeli citizen who should be detained pending trial; the presiding magistrate judge ordered him released provided he surrender his passports and wear a GPS monitor.
[42] They coordinated a network spreading the false allegations through Ukrainian lawmakers Oleksandr Dubinsky and Andrii Derkach, Prosecutor Kostiantyn Kulyk and businessmen Dmytro Firtash and Konstantin Kilimnik.
[44] Dubinsky, Derkach and Kulyk were sanctioned by the U.S. government in the closing days of the Trump administration, and in November 2023 Ukrainian authorities indicted them on treason charges.
[46] Oleksandr Dubinsky is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament who four years ago helped Rudy Giuliani in his attempts to find information in support of the false Biden-Ukraine conspiracy.
In November 2023 Oleksander Dubinsky was charged for carrying out subversive informational activities by publishing "fakes about the alleged interference of Ukrainian high-ranking officials" in the U.S. 2020 presidential elections.
[5] The recordings, which were not verified as authentic and appeared to be heavily edited,[50] did not provide evidence to support the ongoing conspiracy theory that Biden wanted the prosecutor fired to protect his son.
The Treasury Department added that Derkach "waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election," including by the release of "edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit U.S.
Trump and Giuliani associates Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing attempted to persuade Attorney General William Barr to drop charges against Firtash but failed.
Peter Schweizer, editor-at-large at Breitbart News and president of the conservative Government Accountability Institute, was the first person to spread the falsehoods about Joe Biden and Burisma in his book "Secret Empires".
[24] Schweizer launched a media blitz in 2019 to help the conspiracy spread and appeared and wrote editorials repeating his lie in multiple news outlets.
[24] Beginning in the spring of 2019, Solomon published a series of editorials which The Hill notes are now part of Congressional inquiries due to their connection to the spreading of lies.
[75] Media Matters reported in September 2023 that the previous month Solomon published a State Department briefing memo prepared for Joe Biden's December 2015 trip to Ukraine.
The false conspiracy theory was mentioned on Sean Hannity's program, with him claiming Solomon had caught Joe Biden in an "international corruption scandal".
[82] Trump's first impeachment charge of abuse of power was triggered by a July 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which then-President Trump unsuccessfully tried to pressure Zelenskyy in a quid pro quo manner to start a publicly announced investigation of Burisma and the Bidens in exchange for the release of congressionally mandated financial and military aid to Ukraine and the promise of a Trump–Zelenskyy meeting at the White House.
[83] During the hearings and impeachment trial of President Trump in 2019–20, he and his allies repeatedly alleged that Joe Biden and his son had engaged in corrupt activities in Ukraine.
[82][84] Trump said he planned to make it a major issue during the 2020 United States presidential election,[85] while a Republican-controlled Senate committee carried out an investigation into the allegations in spring 2020.
[87] Working together with Andrii Derkach (an active Russian agent),[54] Dmytro Firtash, and other individuals linked to Russian intelligence and organized crime,[88][52] Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and his associates spearheaded an effort to gather information in Ukraine to advance the allegations, and Attorney General William Barr confirmed that the Justice Department had created an "intake process" to review Giuliani's findings.
[89] In late 2019, it was revealed that the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which Giuliani had once led, was investigating him for multiple felonies relating to his activities in Ukraine.
[90][91] Intelligence officials warned Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Senate committee investigating the Bidens, that he risked spreading Russian disinformation.
These officials were also concerned that Giuliani would be used as a conduit for disinformation, including "leaks" of emails that would mix genuine with forged material to implicate Hunter Biden in corrupt dealings.
[95] In October 2020, during the last weeks of the presidential campaign, the New York Post published an article, with the involvement of Donald Trump's personal attorney Giuliani and former chief strategist Steve Bannon, about a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.
[5] The article's veracity was strongly questioned by most mainstream media outlets, analysts and intelligence officials, due to the chain of custody of the laptop and its contents, and suspicion that it may have been part of a disinformation campaign.
[106] In an August 2023 Fox News interview, Shokin said he was fired as prosecutor general "at the insistence of then-Vice President [Biden] because I was investigating Burisma."
"[107][108] Hunter Biden is a lawyer whose career previously included a period as an executive vice president at MBNA and three years at the United States Department of Commerce.
[111] Former Politico reporter Marc Caputo said in January 2025 that in 2019 the campaign of a rival to Biden for the Democratic nomination for the 2020 presidential election gave him opposition research on Burisma.
[113] The Washington Post reported that during a November 7 luncheon with the Republican Governance Group, McCarthy's successor Mike Johnson indicated there was insufficient evidence to initiate formal impeachment proceedings.