Brian Kilmeade on Sunday inadvertently took a sledgehammer to a load-bearing pillar holding up a long-debunked conspiracy that Republicans are currently trying to use to impeach President Joe Biden, interviewing a guest who discredited the figure at the heart of that story in a matter of seconds.
The guest was former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who appeared on One Nation with host Kilmeade over the weekend.
After asking him briefly about the state of the war with Russia, Kilmeade steered Poroshenko towards his relationship with Viktor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor general fired after 14 months in office plagued by allegations he was ineffective at tackling corruption.
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Shokin was ousted in March 2016, with then-Vice President Biden throwing his weight behind the push for his dismissal. Biden later publicly claimed he’d threatened to withhold a $1 billion financial aid package from Ukraine until Shokin was out.
Despite similar calls from European officials and literal protests in the street demanding Shokin’s resignation, however, Donald Trump and his allies would seize on the Biden connection, claiming that he’d actually strong-armed Ukraine’s parliament after Shokin began investigating a gas company tied to Hunter Biden.
Shokin himself fanned the flames of this theory, telling Fox News last month that Poroshenko had fired him at Biden’s insistence “because I was investigating Burisma,” the company paying Hunter Biden, who was appointed to its board of directors in 2014.
Sources ranging from Obama-era administration officials to Ukrainian prosecutors and anti-corruption activists have repeatedly debunked this theory, but it hasn’t stopped Republicans from wielding it as an impetus to kickstart an impeachment inquiry into the Biden family’s alleged corruption.
Kilmeade tried to help that effort on Sunday, asking Poroshenko directly why it was that Shokin was fired.
“First of all, this is the completely crazy person,” Poroshenko began. “This is something wrong with him.”
“Second, there is no one single word of truth,” he continued. “And third, I hate the idea to make any comments and to make any intervention in the American election… Please do not use the such person like Shokin to undermine the trust between bipartisan support and Ukraine.”
“Right,” Kilmeade said meekly. “What do you mean—He’s not your friend?”
Poroshenko replied that he hadn’t seen Shokin in “maybe four years” or so. “And hate the idea to have him,” he continued, “because he play very dirty game, unfortunately.”
“Okay, so that is not true,” Kilmeade said. “He didn’t get fired because of Joe Biden.”
