By John Solomon
September 29, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" -
Former Vice
President
Joe Biden, now a 2020
Democratic presidential contender, has
locked into a specific story about the
controversy in Ukraine.
He insists that, in spring 2016, he
strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief
prosecutor solely because Biden believed
that official was corrupt and inept, not
because the Ukrainian was investigating
a natural gas company, Burisma Holdings,
that hired Biden's son, Hunter, into a
lucrative job.
There’s just one problem.
Hundreds of pages of never-released
memos and documents — many from inside
the American team helping Burisma to
stave off its legal troubles — conflict
with Biden’s narrative.
And they raise the troubling prospect
that U.S. officials may have painted a
false picture in Ukraine that helped
ease Burisma’s legal troubles and stop
prosecutors’ plans to interview Hunter
Biden during the 2016 U.S.
presidential election.
For instance, Burisma’s American legal
representatives met with Ukrainian
officials just days after Biden forced
the firing of the country’s chief
prosecutor and offered “an apology for
dissemination of false information by
U.S. representatives and public figures”
about the Ukrainian prosecutors,
according to the
Ukrainian government’s official memo of
the meeting. The effort to secure
that meeting began the same day the
prosecutor's firing was announced.
In addition, Burisma’s American team
offered to introduce Ukrainian
prosecutors to Obama administration
officials to make amends, according to
that memo and the American legal
team’s internal emails.
The memos raise troubling questions:
1.) If the Ukraine prosecutor’s
firing involved only his
alleged corruption and ineptitude, why
did Burisma's American legal team refer
to those allegations as “false
information?"
2.) If the firing had nothing to do
with the Burisma case, as Biden has
adamantly claimed, why would
Burisma’s American lawyers contact the
replacement prosecutor within hours of
the termination and urgently seek a
meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case?
Ukrainian prosecutors say they have
tried to get this information to the
U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) since
the summer of 2018, fearing it might be
evidence of possible violations of U.S.
ethics laws. First, they hired a former
federal prosecutor to bring the
information to the U.S. attorney in New
York, who, they say, showed no interest.
Then, the Ukrainians reached out to
President Trump’s personal lawyer,
Rudy Giuliani.
Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr
Zelensky, told Trump in
July that he plans to launch his own
wide-ranging investigation into what
happened with the Bidens and Burisma.
“I’m knowledgeable about the
situation,” Zelensky told Trump, asking
the American president to forward any
evidence he might know about. "The issue
of the investigation of the case is
actually the issue of making sure to
restore the honesty so we will take care
of that and will work on the
investigation of the case.”
Biden has faced scrutiny since
December 2015, when the New
York Times published a story noting that
Burisma hired Hunter Biden just
weeks after the vice president was asked
by President Obama to oversee
U.S.-Ukraine relations. That story also
alerted Biden’s office that Prosecutor
General Viktor Shokin had an active
investigation of Burisma and its
founder.
Documents I obtained this year detail
an effort to change the narrative after
the Times story about Hunter Biden, with
the help of the Obama State Department.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
Hunter Biden’s American business
partner in Burisma, Devon Archer, texted
a colleague two days after the Times
story about a strategy to counter the
“new wave of scrutiny” and stated that
he and Hunter Biden had just met at the
State Department. The text suggested
there was about to be a new “USAID
project the embassy is announcing with
us” and that it was “perfect for us to
move forward now with momentum.”
I have sued the State Department for
any records related to that meeting. The
reason is simple: There is both a public
interest and an ethics question to
knowing if Hunter Biden and his team
sought State’s assistance while his
father was vice president.
The controversy ignited anew earlier
this year
when I disclosed that Joe Biden
admitted during a 2018 videotaped speech
that, as vice president in March 2016,
he threatened to cancel $1 billion in
U.S. loan guarantees, to pressure
Ukraine’s then-President Petro
Poroshenko to fire Shokin.
At the time, Shokin’s office was
investigating Burisma. Shokin told me he
was making plans to question Hunter
Biden about $3 million in fees that
Biden and his partner, Archer, collected
from Burisma through
their American firm. Documents seized by
the FBI in an unrelated case confirm the
payments, which in many months totaled
more than $166,000.
Some media outlets have reported
that, at the time Joe Biden forced the
firing in March 2016, there were no open
investigations. Those reports are wrong.
A British-based investigation of
Burisma's owner was closed down in early
2015 on a technicality when a deadline
for documents was not met. But the
Ukraine Prosecutor General's office
still had two open inquiries in March
2016, according to the official case
file provided me. One of those cases
involved taxes; the other, allegations
of corruption. Burisma announced
the cases against it were not closed and
settled until January 2017.
After I first
reported it in a column, the New
York Times and ABC
News published similar stories
confirming my reporting.
Joe Biden has since responded that
he forced Shokin’s firing over concerns
about corruption and ineptitude, which
he claims were widely shared by Western
allies, and that it had nothing to do
with the Burisma investigation.
Some of the new documents I obtained
call that claim into question.
In a
newly sworn affidavit prepared for a
European court, Shokin testified that
when he was fired in March 2016, he was
told the reason was that Biden was
unhappy about the Burisma
investigation. “The truth is that I was
forced out because I was leading a
wide-ranging corruption probe into
Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm
active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son,
Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board
of Directors,” Shokin testified.
“On several occasions President
Poroshenko asked me to have a look at
the case against Burisma and consider
the possibility of winding down the
investigative actions in respect of this
company but I refused to close this
investigation,” Shokin added.
Shokin certainly would have reason to
hold a grudge over his firing. But his
account is supported by documents from
Burisma’s legal team in America, which
appeared to be moving into Ukraine with
intensity as Biden’s effort to fire
Shokin picked up steam.
Burisma’s own accounting records show
that it paid tens of thousands of
dollars while Hunter Biden served on the
board of an American lobbying and public
relations firm, Blue Star Strategies,
run by
Sally Painter and
Karen Tramontano, who both served in
President
Bill Clinton’s
administration.
Just days before Biden forced
Shokin’s firing, Painter met with the
No. 2 official at the Ukrainian embassy
in Washington and asked to meet
officials in Kiev around the same time
that Joe Biden visited there. Ukrainian
embassy employee Oksana Shulyar emailed
Painter afterward: “With regards to the
meetings in Kiev, I suggest that you
wait until the next week when there is
an expected vote of the government’s
reshuffle.”
Ukraine’s Washington embassy
confirmed the conversations between
Shulyar and Painter but said the
reference to a shakeup in Ukrainian
government was not specifically
referring to Shokin’s firing or anything
to do with Burisma.
Painter then asked one of the Ukraine
embassy’s workers to open the door for
meetings with Ukraine’s prosecutors
about the Burisma investigation, the
memos show. Eventually, Blue Star would
pay that Ukrainian official money for
his help with the prosecutor's office.
At the time, Blue Star worked in
concert with an American criminal
defense lawyer, John Buretta, who was
hired by Burisma to help address the
case in Ukraine. The case was settled in
January 2017 for a few million dollars
in fines for alleged tax issues.
Buretta, Painter, Tramontano, Hunter
Biden and Joe Biden’s campaign have not
responded to numerous calls and emails
seeking comment.
On March 29, 2016, the day Shokin’s
firing was announced, Buretta asked to
speak with Yuriy Sevruk, the prosecutor
named to temporarily replace Shokin, but
was turned down, the memos show.
Blue Star, using the Ukrainian
embassy worker it had hired, eventually
scored a meeting with Sevruk on April 6,
2016, a week after Shokin’s
firing. Buretta, Tramontano and Painter
attended that meeting in Kiev, according
to Blue Star’s memos.
Sevruk memorialized the meeting in a
government memo that the general
prosecutor’s office provided to me,
stating that the three Americans offered
an apology for the “false” narrative
that had been provided by U.S. officials
about Shokin being corrupt and inept.
“They realized that the information
disseminated in the U.S. was incorrect
and that they would facilitate my visit
to the U.S. for the purpose of
delivering the true information to the
State Department management,” the memo
stated.
The memo also quoted the Americans as
saying they knew Shokin pursued an
aggressive corruption investigation
against Burisma’s owner, only to be
thwarted by British allies: “These
individuals noted that they had been
aware that the Prosecutor General’s
Office of Ukraine had implemented all
required steps for prosecution … and
that he was released by the British
court due to the underperformance of the
British law enforcement agencies.”
The memo provides a vastly different
portrayal of Shokin than Biden's. And
its contents are partially backed by
subsequent emails from Blue Star and
Buretta that confirm the offer to bring
Ukrainian authorities to meet the Obama
administration in Washington.
For instance, Tramontano wrote the
Ukrainian prosecution team on April 16,
2016, saying U.S. Justice Department
officials, including top international
prosecutor Bruce Swartz, might be
willing to meet. “The reforms are not
known to the US Justice Department and
it would be useful for the Prosecutor
General to meet officials in the US and
share this information directly,” she
wrote.
Buretta sent a similar email to the
Ukrainians, writing that “I think you
would find it productive to meet with
DOJ officials in Washington” and
providing contact information for
Swartz. “I would be happy to help,”
added Buretta, a former senior DOJ
official.
Burisma, Buretta and Blue Star
continued throughout 2016 to try to
resolve the open issues in Ukraine, and
memos recount various contacts with the
State Department and the U.S. embassy in
Kiev seeking help in getting the Burisma
case resolved.
Just days before Trump took office,
Burisma announced it had resolved all of
its legal issues. And Buretta
gave an interview in Ukraine about
how he helped navigate the issues.
Today, two questions remain.
One is whether it was ethically
improper or even illegal for Biden to
intervene to fire the prosecutor
handling Burisma’s case, given his son’s
interests. That is one that requires
more investigation and the expertise of
lawyers.
The second is whether Biden has given
the American people an honest accounting
of what happened. The new documents I
obtained raise serious doubts about his
story’s credibility. And that’s an issue
that needs to be resolved by voters.
John Solomon is an
award-winning investigative journalist
whose work over the years has exposed
U.S. and FBI intelligence failures
before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal
scientists’ misuse of foster children
and veterans in drug experiments, and
numerous cases of political corruption.
He serves as an investigative columnist
and executive vice president for video
at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports.
This article was originally
published by "The
Hill"-
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