What was Joe doing in Ukraine on Jan 17, 2017?
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Three days before Trump's inauguration, Biden took a trip to Kiev.
It is highly unusual for an outgoing vice president to travel abroad during the days before the beginning of the new administration. An examination of the National Archives reveals no foreign travel on the part of Dick Cheney between the 2008 election and the Obama-Biden inauguration, nor any foreign travel by Vice President Al Gore before the Bush-Cheney inauguration in 2001.
During the time before the inauguration, the outgoing vice president’s duty to the American people is to help the president, the president-elect, and the vice-president-elect with an orderly transition. The closer to inauguration day, the more important it becomes to handle sensitive details diligently.
This was a duty that Joe Biden decided was subordinate to his desire to travel abroad.
Three days before the Trump-Pence inauguration, Biden was halfway around the world meeting with the leaders of a foreign government. Biden’s trip not only took him away from his duties in Washington, it also consumed the attention of many senior presidential, vice-presidential, and State Department staff—for the days before, during, and after the trip—who should have been giving their undivided attention to the transition...
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For Biden, the vice president’s absence from the White House during one of the most important weeks of his official responsibilities, and subjecting himself and senior White House staff to jet lag during the inauguration itself, were reasonable costs for the United States to pay in exchange for his presence in a faraway foreign country.
That country was Ukraine.
Actually that country was Switzerland. He was long scheduled at Davos. Took several side trips, one to Kiev.
But that doesn’t sound nearly as ominous as ‘he broke all precedent, leaving his last week, just to go to Ukraine!!!’
I don’t understand why anyone would subject themselves to sites like these. Who wants to be knowingly misled, even if it’s in bias-confirming directions? I really don’t get it.
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Given the fact that you are wrong, one has to wonder just who it is with confirmation bias. A quick check with Google shows that even leftwing rags like the LA Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post make it clear that the main reason for his trip was to go to Ukraine. Each of them make a different excuse for why he went, the Washington Post actually tried to change the date of the trip - presumably to squelch any discussion over why he went there conducting foreign policy when he shouldn't have been. So the facts in the article George cited seem to match the leftwing propaganda sites, the only discrepancy between all of them being what his motive was.
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@jon-nyc said in What was Joe doing in Ukraine on Jan 17, 2017?:
But that doesn’t sound nearly as ominous as ‘he broke all precedent, leaving his last week, just to go to Ukraine!!!’
Apparently he went on the trip to do good.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/01/joe-biden-foreign-policy/513758/
As President Obama remarked when awarding Joe Biden the most distinguished of all American civilian awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction, Biden has a habit of quoting his mother or father with some folksy aphorism. He’s told me, for example, “My dad used to say to me: ‘Champ, if everything is equally important to you, nothing is important to you.’” I imagined another Bidenesque aphorism for the moment, that sounded like something his parents might say. “Joey, there’s always a chance to do good and be good. Always a chance, even at the very last moment, to do good.”
As Air Force Two approached Andrews Joint Base, the airport the President and Vice President use to fly in and out of Washington, Biden told me he’d spent the last several hours making calls to and having long conversations with five major world leaders.
Squeezing it in. Always a chance to do good.
