THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CORRUPTION AND FIGHTING CORRUPTION:

At a Senate hearing in 2016, a number of GOP senators who are still in office today sat in attendance during discussions of the Obama administration's approach to Ukraine. At those hearings, officials and outside experts repeatedly discussed the need to remove the prosecutor in question -- Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor general -- describing this imperative as central to official U.S. policy.

What's more, Joe Biden's own role in prompting this ouster came up repeatedly, and it was openly and explicitly discussed that the loan guarantees were being used as leverage to bring it about -- as U.S. policy.

None of this was treated as remotely controversial at the time. [...]

At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in March 2016, Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state under President Barack Obama, testified about efforts to oust Shokin. Nuland noted that Shokin had resigned but that the Ukrainian parliament still had to remove him (which happened soon after).

Nuland also told senators that the agenda of the United States' aid program for Ukraine, with the "generous support" of Congress, included replacing Shokin, for the good of fighting corruption in Ukraine.

Nuland noted it was a U.S. priority to secure a "new prosecutor general who is committed" to "indicting and prosecuting the corrupt."

Nuland also cited the loan guarantee as leverage. "We have pegged our next $1 billion loan guarantee" in part on "ensuring that the prosecutor general's office gets cleaned up," Nuland said.

Biden also came up repeatedly at this hearing. Nuland explicitly noted that Biden himself had conditioned U.S. support for Ukraine on getting rid of that prosecutor as a matter of U.S. policy. She cited a speech that Biden had given in Ukraine a few months earlier, in which Biden declared: "The office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform."

In reference to that speech, Nuland told senators that Biden had publicly declared that this reform is "what our support depends on."

GOP senators present at the hearing -- and who remain in office today -- included John Barrasso (Wyo.), Cory Gardner (Colo.), James E. Risch (Idaho) and David Perdue (Ga.).

What this shows is that ousting the prosecutor was about fighting corruption in Ukraine as a matter of administration policy -- and that GOP senators understood this full well at the time. Indeed, none of that stirred any controversy.

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