Fox News spent nearly three hours last month promoting its interview with Viktor Shokin and his conspiracy theory that he had been fired as Ukraine’s prosecutor general due to “corruption” by then-Vice President Joe Biden over Biden’s son, Hunter. But the network’s hosts and anchors have yet to mention that in a Saturday interview on one of its programs, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the claims were false and described Shokin as a “completely crazy person.”
Fox News has spent more than four years pushing the baseless conspiracy theory that Joe Biden forced Shokin’s removal to halt a probe of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company that had placed Hunter Biden on its board. In reality, Vice President Biden was following U.S. policy when he pushed for the firing of Shokin, who was viewed as unwilling to prosecute corruption by U.S. diplomats, foreign governments, international bodies, and Ukrainian anti-corruption groups, and his office had not been actively investigating Burisma at the time Biden sought his removal.
Fox reignited this long-debunked disinformation last month when host Brian Kilmeade interviewed Shokin, who alleged that “Poroshenko fired me at the insistence of the then Vice President Biden because I was investigating Burisma” and accused Biden of “a case of corruption.” In a matter of days, the network devoted nearly three hours of airtime to teasing, airing, and analyzing the interview, running at least 50 segments across 19 different programs.
Kilmeade returned to the story on Saturday during an interview with Poroshenko. The host aired portions of Shokin’s allegations and asked, “Is that why he got fired, because of the billion dollars and the former vice president, now president?”