These moves come just weeks after Fox heavily promoted its interview with Shokin, who claimed he was fired “because I was investigating Burisma” and accused Joe Biden of “corruption,” while skipping over the glaring flaws in his story. On Tuesday night, Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity, a Trump partisan whose show is a major hub for dubious claims about the Bidens, alleged that “evidence of Biden's wrongdoing is now quite overwhelming and questions around the family's shady dealings,” touting in particular the “slam dunk case” of Shokin’s firing.

The Republican claims may sound familiar, as they are a rehash of the Ukrainian disinformation campaign spun up by Rudy Giuliani and his allies and parroted incessantly by Hannity, John Solomon, and other Fox propagandists as they sought to kneecap Biden’s presidential campaign back in 2019. Trump regurgitated their conspiracy theories when he tried to condition military aid to Ukraine on Ukraine’s government announcing a probe of Biden. Public disclosure of that corrupt abuse of power triggered a House impeachment inquiry and ultimately Trump’s first impeachment.

But the underlying allegation that Joe Biden demanded Shokin’s firing to help his son’s business dealings never made sense and was thoroughly dismantled during Trump’s impeachment inquiry, as U.S. officials testified that Shokin had been widely faulted by Western governments for failing to prosecute corruption, they were unaware of Shokin reviving a probe into Burisma (it was reportedly moribund at the time), and Biden’s actions were consistent with U.S. policy. Those officials’ testimony is explained below.

George Kent, Ukraine deputy chief of mission (2015-18)

George Kent, who served as deputy chief of mission in Kyiv, Ukraine, from 2015 to 2018 and then oversaw U.S. foreign policy in the country as deputy assistant secretary of State, addressed the allegation during his public testimony before the inquiry on November 13, 2019.

“What former Vice President Biden requested of former President of Ukraine [Petro] Poroshenko was the removal of a corrupt prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, who had undermined a program of assistance that we had spent, again, U.S. taxpayer money to try to build an independent investigator unit to go after corrupt prosecutors,” Kent said. He went on to agree that Biden was participating in a “whole-of-government effort to address corruption in Ukraine.”

Kent repudiated the claims in greater detail in his sworn deposition. He explained that Biden was following the official U.S. government position that Shokin must be removed because he was “an impediment to the reform of the prosecutorial system, and he had directly undermined in repeated fashion U.S. efforts and U. S. assistance programs.”

“And so,” he added, “because we had a strategic interest in seeing the Ukrainian prosecutor system reformed, and because we have a fiduciary responsibility for U.S. taxpayer dollars, it was the consensus view that Shokin needed to be removed so that the stated goal of reform of the prosecutor general system could move forward.”

Kent also testified that the State Department had put forward the plan for Biden to leverage the U.S. aid to get Shokin removed.

“To the best of my knowledge, the idea originated with [then-Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey] Pyatt in discussion with Assistant Secretary [Victoria] Nuland and then was pitched to the Office of the Vice President,” he said.

Pyatt had denounced “the failure of the institution of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine to successfully fight internal corruption” in a September 2015 speech, adding, “The United States stands behind those who challenge these bad actors.”

Kent further stated that any possible Shokin investigation into Burisma “was not something that I ever recall coming up or being discussed” and that he was unaware of any probe into that company at the time.

Kurt Volker, U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations (2017-19)

Kurt Volker, a former diplomat who served in the White House and State Department under the Bush administration and then as the U.S. special representative for Ukraine negotiations during the Trump administration, concurred in his own deposition before the inquiry.

“There is clear evidence that Vice President Biden did indeed weigh in with the President of Ukraine to have Shokin fired, but the motivations for that are entirely different from” the portrayal by Solomon, he said. “When Vice President Biden made those representations to President Poroshenko he was representing U.S. policy at the time.”

“And it was a general assumption – I was not doing U.S. policy at the time – but a general assumption among the European Union, France, Germany, American diplomats, U.K., that Shokjn [Shokin] was not doing his job as a prosecutor general. He was not pursuing corruption cases,” Volker continued.

Volker went on to say that Shokin’s “reputation is one of a prosecutor general who was protecting certain interests rather than prosecuting them” and reiterated that Biden had been “executing U.S. policy at the time and what was widely understood internationally to be the right policy, right.”

Marie Yovanovitch, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine (2016-19)

Marie Yovanovitch, who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2016 to 2019, similarly testified that “Vice President Biden, the IMF, pretty much every country that is present in Ukraine all felt that Mr. Shokin as prosecutor general was not doing his job,” leading to calls for his ouster.