• Former Ukraine chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was fired at Joe Biden’s insistence, claims the then-VP wanted to stop him investigating his son
• Former Ukraine chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin, 70, made the shocking claims in a little-known video from around 2019
• At the time of his firing, Shokin was investigating oil company Burisma Holdings for corruption – when Hunter was serving on the firm’s board 

The ex-Ukrainian prosecutor fired at Joe Biden’s insistence claimed the then-Vice President wanted to stop him investigating his son – and even planned to haul Hunter in for questioning.

Former Ukraine chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin, 70, made the shocking claims in a little-known video from around 2019.

The video has recently resurfaced, along with fresh evidence supporting the theory that Joe had him fired to kill a probe into Burisma, the allegedly corrupt gas firm on whose board Hunter served.

Shokin is set to rehash his claims in an interview with Fox News on Saturday evening.

‘Joe Biden had reason to fear that all this would eventually fall on his son,’ the ex-prosecutor said in the 2019 video.

‘When we started to actively move forward with the aim of clarifying this crime and finding who had been guilty of violating Ukrainian laws at Burisma we ended up discovering that the administrators recruited in May-June 2014 were probably involved. These were Devon Archer, Hunter Biden and others.’

‘We planned to interrogate Hunter Biden, Devon Archer [but] we did not have time,’ Shokin said in another interview with Ukrainian news site Strana on May 6 that year.

Burisma was accused of evading one billion Ukrainian Hryvnia (up to $63 million) of taxes during Hunter’s time as a board member in 2014 and 2015, opening up possible liabilities for those signing off on its accounts.

The firestorm of controversy over Joe’s intervention in Ukraine allegedly on his son’s behalf has been dubbed a ‘debunked conspiracy theory’ by the left, but is now being championed by Republicans as a reason for impeaching the president.

Shokin’s claims that he was directly investigating Hunter – and was shut down as a result – are set to add fuel to the flames.

Hunter and his friend Devon Archer both joined the Burisma board in 2014 with a salary of $1 million per year. Devon took his role just days after meeting with Joe at the White House.

Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky was under investigation by Ukrainian, US and UK authorities at the time for corruptly obtaining gas licenses and alleged fraud.

Joe boasted publicly about threatening to withhold $1 billion in US aid to Ukraine in 2015 until Shokin was fired, and was recorded on a call with then-president Petro Poroshenko pushing for the top prosecutor’s dismissal.

Shokin was finally booted from the General Prosecutor’s Office in March 2016.

Stories in the New York Times and Washington Post have dismissed the connection between the events, reporting that the investigation of Burisma was ‘dormant’ under Shokin’s 13-month stint as chief prosecutor, and that his firing was pushed by the International Monetary Fund, European Union and US policy due to his lackluster approach to prosecutions.

But records obtained by DailyMail.com show Shokin opened and pursued cases against Zlochevsky, seized his assets, and even prosecuted his own staff for letting the oligarch steal away to Cyprus with $23 million temporarily frozen by a British court.

Documents published this month show top White House and State Department officials were ‘impressed’ with his office’s work as late as January 2016, while bureaucrats deemed the Ukrainian government made ‘sufficient progress’ to warrant a $1 billion loan in October 2015, shortly before Biden threatened to withhold the cash.

Shokin was promoted from his deputy role to chief prosecutor in February 2015.

His predecessor had botched an investigation into Burisma the previous year, failing to provide a UK court with enough evidence to uphold a freeze on Zlochevsky’s assets.

In June 2015 Shokin launched a probe into gas licenses issued while Zlochevsky was environment minister, and another to root out alleged accomplices in the prosecutor’s office.

He met with US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt the next month, and his office published a press release on the Zlochevsky ‘investigation’s progress… in particular the intensification of cooperation with the British in this direction’.

In public statements Pyatt slammed the endemic corruption in the prosecutor’s office, but did not call him out by name.

Ukrainian news sites reported ‘two cottages, two land plots, a household of 922 sq.m., a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a trailer’ belonging to Zlochevsky were seized at Shokin’s behest in February 2015.

Shokin also publicly complained in October that year about the UK court unfreezing Zlochevsky’s assets, and launched a joint probe with British and European authorities, according to a report in the Kyiv Post.

‘The depiction as “dormant” has nothing to do with the reality of the facts,’ Shokin railed in his 2019 video.

‘We were advancing, me and my colleagues, and we were about to reach the outcome of this case.’

He even committed to his claims in an affidavit filed in a European court in 2020.

‘I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Bursima… and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors,’ he wrote.

‘In my conversations with Poroshenko at the time, he was emphatic that I should cease my investigations regarding Burisma.

‘I refused to close this investigation. Therefore, I was forced to leave office, under direct and intense pressure from Joe Biden.’

On June 11 2015, top State Department official Victoria Nuland replied to a letter from Shokin on then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s behalf, saying the department had ‘been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government.’

‘The ongoing reform of your office, law enforcement, and the judiciary will enable you to investigate and prosecute corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair, and transparent manner,’ Nuland wrote.

A task force of State, Justice and Treasury officials reviewing the proposed $1 billion loan to Ukraine concluded in October 2015 that ‘Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee’, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by website Just the News.

The review did not tie the loan to the dismissal of Shokin, despite Joe’s later push for his firing.

And National Security Council staffer Eric Ciaramella wrote in a January 21 2016 email his team were ‘super impressed’ with staff from Shokin’s office after a two-hour meeting with them.

But even if Shokin’s Burisma probe was vigorous, his other corruption investigations were seen to be lacking.

The justice chief’s public support in Ukraine was ailing over his failure to prosecute criminals from the corrupt previous administration, and protestors were calling for his and others’ resignation in street demonstrations in the capital.

His image took a serious hit in July 2015 when his dogged deputy David Sakvarelidze found two of Shokin’s allies and employees had an apartment with bags of $400,000 cash, 65 diamonds, copies of Shokin’s passports and a Kalashnikov rifle.

Sakvarelidze’s probe was shelved and he was pushed out of his job, according to a 2019 report by the Independent.

From late 2015, Joe ramped up his own efforts to take down Shokin. In the eight days before his eventual sacking in March 2016, Biden phoned Poroshenko four times to hammer home the threat that aid would not be forthcoming without his resignation, his former aides told the LA Times.

In a January 2018 talk for the Council on Foreign Relations, Joe boasted that he told Poroshenko at the time: ‘We’re not going to give you the billion dollars… If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’ adding: ‘Well, son of a b***h, he got fired.’

Despite the murky dealings of the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office, testimony from insiders makes it clear that Zlochevsky was concerned about the probe.

In testimony to Congress earlier this month, Hunter’s fellow Burisma board member Devon Archer said the Burisma owner and his executive Vadym Pozharskyi ‘placed constant pressure’ on Hunter to get help from ‘Washington DC’ to deal with Shokin’s probe.

Archer claimed he witnessed Hunter and the Burisma owner ‘called DC’ to discuss the matter in December 2015.

‘Shokin was considered a threat to the business,’ Archer said during a subsequent interview with Tucker Carlson.

‘Shokin was taking a close look at Burisma,’ he said. ‘He was a threat. He ended up seizing assets of [Zlochevsky].’