While former Vice President Joe Biden oversaw foreign policy in Ukraine, his son Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings, the largest gas company in the fledgling democracy.
Despite a recently concluded investigation by Senate Republicans that found no wrongdoing by the Bidens, claims to the contrary have continued to circulate on social media.
"VP Biden threatened to withhold 1 billion dollars from Ukraine to save his son's job," reads a
meme posted to Facebook by Secure America Now. The meme has been shared more than 9,000 times since Oct. 18.
It's true that Joe Biden leveraged $1 billion in aid to persuade Ukraine to oust its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in March 2016. But it wasn't because Shokin was investigating Burisma. It was because Shokin wasn't pursuing corruption among the country's politicians.
As European and American diplomats pressed Ukraine to clean up its corruption, they focused on Shokin's leadership of the Prosecutor General's Office, which he took over in February 2015.
Mike Carpenter, who served as a foreign policy adviser to the then-vice president, told
USA TODAY that Shokin "never went after any corrupt individuals at all" and "never prosecuted any high-profile cases of corruption."