Commentary
Furthermore, Greene alleged that the money was paid in order to shut down a Ukrainian prosecutor’s investigation into Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where Joe Biden’s son Hunter was a board member.
Meanwhile, on June 12, Sen.
Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), on the floor of the Senate, said that “that the foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them.” According to the information cited by Grassley, there are “17 total recordings” that acted “as a sort of insurance policy.”
Grassley was one of the very few individuals who has seen an unredacted version of the FBI’s 1023 document and had been repeatedly pushing FBI Director Christopher Wray for transparency.
When that didn’t work, he spoke on the Senate floor.
“According to the 1023, the foreign national [Zlochevsky or Pozharskyi] possesses 15 audio recordings of phone calls between him and Hunter Biden'' and “two audio recordings of phone calls between him and then-Vice President Joe Biden.”
Grassley said the “recordings were allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy for the foreign national in case he got into a tight spot.”
Then-Vice President Biden was appointed as the Obama administration’s
point man on Ukraine in February 2014. During the same time as his first visit to the country in April 2014, Burisma announced that the business partner of Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, had
joined its board.
Hunter Biden himself had
also joined Burisma’s board, but that wasn’t
announced until May 12, 2014. While Joe Biden was meeting with the new Ukrainian government, Hunter Biden and Archer were meeting with Burisma owner Zlochevsky, along with his close adviser Vadym Pozharskyi and Russian businesswoman Elena Baturina in Italy’s Lake Como.
Notably,
Baturina had wired Hunter Biden’s firm $3.5 million just two months earlier, according to a Senate investigation.
On May 12,
the same day that Hunter’s appointment was formally announced, Pozharskyi
sent an email to both Hunter and Archer discussing that April 2014 meeting in Lake Como.
“We urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message or signal to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions,” Pozharskyi told Hunter and Archer.
The “politically motivated actions” were actually ongoing investigations into Burisma and its owner, Zlochevsky, who had been
issued an unusually
large number of permits to extract oil and gas during his time as Ukraine’s minister of natural resources.
UK authorities had just
frozen $23.5 million in assets belonging to Zlochevsky as part of a money-laundering investigation. And at precisely the same time that Hunter Biden joined Burisma, Vitaly Yarema, the Ukrainian prosecutor,
opened a formal investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma.
Hunter and Archer must have been expecting the email from Pozharskyi because plans to represent Burisma’s interests in Washington had already begun. On the same day of Pozharskyi’s email, Heather King, a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner, sent an
email to Hunter and Archer detailing her firm’s strategy for Burisma.
King wrote that she planned to provide legal and political services for Burisma “right up to the line” at which the law firm would have to disclose its work under federal lobbying laws. King also wrote of plans to meet with State Department officials in order to advocate for Burisma. As it turns out, Burisma had wired $250,000 to Boies Schiller Flexner on May 7, 2014, according to a
September 2020 Senate report. As the report notes, this was the earliest known payment from Burisma that was related to Hunter Biden.
As all this was going on, two other important events took place. On May 21, a week after Pozharskyi’s email to Hunter, Joe Biden made a
trip to Romania and the island of Cyprus—the first visit by a senior U.S. official in 50 years. We now know that Cyprus is where Burisma’s headquarters
is located. No real explanation has been given for that trip, other than a
White House statement that noted Biden’s intention to provide “strong support to reunify the island.”
Four days later, on May 25, Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire politician, was elected president of Ukraine. Joe Biden became close with Poroshenko and helped
obtain for the country a four-year, $17.5 billion IMF package in March 2015.
Kent stated that he had been told by Ukraine’s deputy prosecutor general that Burisma had paid a $7 million bribe to Ukraine’s chief prosecutors’ office to end the investigation into Zlochevsky. At the time of the alleged bribe payment,
Hunter Biden was—according to Burisma itself—in charge of the company’s legal affairs. The alleged bribe apparently worked. The Ukrainian prosecutor’s office subsequently
sent a letter to its UK counterparts on Christmas Day 2014, stating there was no longer an active case against Zlochevsky. The UK prosecutors released Zlochevsky’s previously seized funds.
Victoria Nuland, the former assistant U.S. secretary of state who helped bring Biden into Ukraine’s politics, later
told congressional investigators that Amos Hochstein, Obama’s U.S. special envoy, privately conveyed his concerns—albeit somewhat belatedly—about Hunter’s role at Burisma to the elder Biden in October 2015 and then again during a flight to Ukraine on Dec. 7, 2015.
Following the alleged bribe in Ukraine and the end of the case in the UK,
Yarema suddenly resigned on Feb. 9, 2015. His replacement was Victor Shokin, a former prosecutor who was
brought out of retirement and appointed the following day by Poroshenko.
Shokin would soon present a major problem for Burisma and its owner Zlochevsky.
I mentioned earlier that Zlochevsky, Burisma’s owner, and his adviser Pozharskyi appear to be interconnected with Elena Baturina. There was that oddly timed meeting at Lake Como in April 2014 that they both either attended or closely overlapped.
Further connections between these parties come via a dinner held at
Cafe Milano on April 16, 2015. We know from a
series of March 2015 emails that Pozharskyi and Elena Baturina both were invited to attend by Hunter Biden, although we don’t know exactly why they were in D.C. in the first place.
We know that dinner
included Joe Biden, who “
stayed for about 40 minutes.” We also know that Baturina, for reasons that remain unknown, sent a series of payments after that dinner, between May 6 and Dec. 8, 2015, to Hunter Biden’s firm, Rosemont.
Pozharskyi emailed Hunter the following day to thank him for
“inviting me to DC and giving me an opportunity to meet your father and spend some time together.”
Meanwhile, Shokin was busy getting his investigation of Burisma up and running. Initially, Shokin’s appointment was welcomed by U.S. officials, including Nuland, who
personally wrote Shokin in June 2015 that “we have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government.”
According to Shokin, in July and into August 2015, he began preparing
to question Hunter Biden about money laundering activities tracing directly back to Burisma. Notably, these same concerns over money laundering would later be raised by Latvian authorities just as Shokin was being pushed out.
Shokin says it was at that point that pressure to stop Burisma activities increased, including a visit from Ukrainian President Poroshenko, who personally asked Shokin to wind down the investigations into Hunter Biden and Burisma; Shokin initially refused. Meanwhile, the pressure on all parties continued to mount.
Hunter Biden received another email from Burisma’s Pozharskyi on Nov. 2, 2015. Obviously worried over the progress that Shokin was making, Pozharskyi demanded that the younger Biden produce “deliverables,” stating that the “ultimate purpose” was to “close down any cases or pursuits” against Burisma’s owner. He also outlined his concerns over the lack of involvement from top U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
Those assets were
eventually physically seized on Feb. 2, 2016, just before Shokin was removed from his position by Poroshenko. It appears that Hunter Biden must have taken Pozharskyi seriously. On the same day that Pozharskyi emailed him about deliverables, Hunter suddenly
reached out to Amos Hochstein, Obama’s special envoy. Hunter met in-person with Hochstein four days later, on Nov. 6, 2015. Hochstein later reluctantly
told congressional investigators that Hunter “wanted to know my views on Burisma and Zlochevsky.”
Burisma also
hired Blue Star Strategies at
Hunter’s urging in November 2015, just as he was receiving his instructions from Pozharskyi. Blue Star would later come
under federal investigation for its
undisclosed lobbying on behalf of Burisma. Although Hunter Biden was moving aggressively, his actions were apparently not direct enough.
Less than three weeks after Pozharskyi’s email, Joe Biden entered the picture,
demanding the removal of Shokin on Nov. 22, 2015. After Poroshenko failed to comply with Biden’s initial demands, Biden famously leveraged $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer loan guarantees to force Shokin’s removal. On March 29, 2016, less than seven weeks after the
seizure of Zlochevsky’s assets, Shokin was officially fired.
Meanwhile, in October 2014, Ukraine
established the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) in response to pressure from the International Monetary Fund and with
assistance from Joe Biden. The organization was slow to get up and running. But on Jan. 22, 2016, just as Shokin was being forced out, NABU Director Artem Sytnyk
announced that NABU was very close to signing a memorandum of cooperation with the FBI.
The agreement proceeded rapidly and by Feb. 9, 2016, the
FBI had a permanent representative onsite at NABU offices. By the end of June 2016, the FBI had a
full office in Ukraine’s NABU. However, for reasons that remain unclear, NABU repeatedly refused to make the memorandum with the FBI public and
went to court in 2018 to prevent its release.
It was later
reported that “a series of loan payments totaling about $16.6 million that were routed from companies in Belize and the United Kingdom to Burisma through Ukraine’s PrivatBank between 2012 and 2015.” Latvian officials claimed that a portion of those funds were transferred to the younger Biden, Archer, and the two unnamed individuals,
one of whom was a U.S. citizen.
Despite requests for assistance, a Latvian official said “his government received no criminal evidence from Ukraine and thus took no further action on the investigation.”
It seems hard to believe that the FBI, with its presence within Ukraine’s anti-corruption offices, was unaware of these transactions.
