Burisma was then facing a state investigation over allegations that company Chairman Nikolai Zlochevskiy had used his official position as Minister of Environment in the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych to award the company lucrative oil and gas permits.
While the probe was underway, then-Vice President Biden made more than a dozen trips to Ukraine, ostensibly to support the new government of Petro Poroshenko. But during one of those trips in 2016, the vice president threatened to withdraw U.S. aid if Poroshenko didn’t fire the prosecutor general in charge of the Burisma probe.
“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ ... He got fired.”
Shokin himself confirmed in written answers to questions from Solomon that before he was fired, he was planning to conduct “interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the [Burisma] executive board, including Hunter Biden.”
Biden’s staff and, indeed, the Democratic National Committee leadership should have seen this coming. It’s not as if Hunter Biden’s appointment to the Burisma board was a secret, nor the fact that he got paid large sums of money for his services, at the same time that his powerful father was intervening in the company’s favor with the president of Ukraine.
This is no skeleton in Uncle Joe’s closet. It’s a raw cadaver, and it stinks to high heaven, despite the mounds of dirt piled on top of it by the national media.
The Wall Street Journal first announced Hunter Biden’s appointment to the Burisma board in May 2014 in a Page 4 item; one columnist in The Washington Post called Hunter Biden’s behavior “nefarious.”
“Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice president or president,” Carney said.
Following that White House comment, the media obediently buried Joe Biden’s gross conflict of interest until 2018, when Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, detailed the allegations in a book titled “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.”
Schweizer supported his allegation that the payments amounted to a sweetheart deal by noting that Hunter Biden had “no background in Ukraine” and “no background in energy policy.”
“There’s really no legitimate explanation as to why he got this deal with the energy company, other than the fact his father was responsible for doling out money in Ukraine itself,” Schweizer said.
The Ukrainian prosecutor general promises to turn over investigative files to the U.S. Department of Justice, so Joe Biden’s Ukraine scandal could just be getting started.
A source close to the prosecutor said last week that he was also investigating a corrupt intervention by Ukrainian authorities in the 2016 election in favor of Hillary Clinton, when they leaked the so-called “black ledger” of the pro-Russian Party of Regions to U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yavonovitch, an Obama appointee who remains on the job today.
“We know the black ledger is real, but knowing the Party of Regions, we can’t say if money allegedly paid to Paul Manafort was actually given to Manafort,” Ukrainian Member of Parliament Volodymyr Ariev told me.
Joe Biden might soon be looking back on the inappropriate touching allegations with regret. Not regret for his actions, but regret that public attention so quickly drifted off to other, more damaging scandals.
