The policy makers concluded that the prosecutor Shokin was OK and the aid money should be approved:
Just weeks before then-Vice President Joe Biden took the opposite action in late 2015, a task force of State, Treasury and Justice Department officials declared that Ukraine had made adequate progress on anti-corruption reforms and deserved a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee.
“Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee,” reads an Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizing the recommendation of the Interagency Policy Committee (IPC) – a task force created to advise the Obama White House on whether Ukraine was cleaning up its endemic corruption and deserved more Western foreign aid. Until Joe Biden reversed US policy:
In the weeks that ensued, State and Justice officials proceeded with their plan laid out in the October memo, even inviting the senior leadership of Shokin’s office to come to Washington in January 2016 for further collaboration.
When those prosecutors arrived in Washington, according to the State Department memos, word leaked out that Biden had in December 2015 changed the U.S. message. The U.S. embassy in Kyiv reported the leak in the Ukrainian press, prompting a new thread among the IPC task force members that once again affirmed that they were “super impressed” with Shokin’s team.
“According to Dzerkalo Tyzhnya news website, ‘the U.S. State Department has made it clear to the Ukrainian authorities that it links the provision of a one billion dollar loan guarantee to Ukraine to the dismissal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin,” the Kyiv embassy wrote members of the IPC task force.
“Buckle in,” Pyatt wrote in a cryptic response to the leak on Jan. 21, 2016. Tom |
