While the meetings were supposedly about training the Ukrainians quickly realized that the Obama officials were concerned with two highly political investigations; one involving VP Biden's family and one involving a lobbying firm connected to then candidate Trump.
It was clear that the US wanted the Ukrainians to reopen an investigation into GOP lobbyist Paul Manafort.
That led to deliberate Ukraine meddling in the US election. While the Ukrainians had evidence that was damaging to Manafort for 2 years they only released it 10 days after Manafort was made Trump's campaign chairman. The release was ruled by a Ukraine court to be a direct attempt to influence the US election.
Interestingly there was also evidence of payments to Americans other than Manafort including former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig but the Ukrainians said the US officials, all of whom were at the time working for Obama, weren't interested.
In parallel US officials told the Ukrainians that they wanted Ukraine to drop the investigation into a corrupt Ukrainian company, Burisma, which was paying Joe Biden's son as much as $83,000 a month to be on their board, and let the FBI take over. Since the corruption involved Ukrainians Ukraine naturally refused.
Shortly thereafter Joe Biden told the Ukrainians that unless they fired the man investigating the company his son paid he, Biden, would cut off $1B in aid. The prosecutor was fired and the investigation was transferred to the same Ukraine organization, National Anti-Corruption Bureau(NABU), that eventually released the information against Manafort. NABU dropped the investigation into Hunter Biden.
Essentially in 2016 the Obama administration pressured Ukraine to investigate Paul Manafort who was involved with Trump's campaign while simultaneously pressuring the Ukraine to end an investigation that would be damaging to Joe Biden.
Now that's corruption.
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