DC’s Atlantic
Council raked in funding from Hunter Biden’s
corruption-stained employer while courting his VP
father
The shady arrangement between the Atlantic Council
and Burisma – the gas company at the center of the
‘Ukrainegate’ scandal – is just one dubious deal out
of many at a DC think tank that has become a
clearinghouse for legal corruption.
By Max Blumenthal
October 15, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" -With its relentless
focus on corruption in Russia and Ukraine, the
Atlantic Council has distinguished itself from other
top-flight think tanks in Washington. Over the past
several years, it has held innumerable conferences
and panel discussions, issued a string of reports,
and published literally hundreds of essays on
Russia’s “kleptocracy” and the scourge of Kremlin
disinformation.
At the same time,
this institution has posed as a faithful partner to
Ukraine’s imperiled democracy, organizing countless
programs on the urgency of economic reforms to tamp
down on corruption in the country.
But behind the
curtain, the Atlantic Council has initiated a
lucrative relationship with a corruption-tainted
Ukrainian gas company, the Burisma Group, that is
worth as much as $250,000 a year. The partnership
has paid for lavish conferences in Monaco and helped
bring Burisma’s oligarchic founder out of the cold.
This alliance has
remained stable even as official Washington goes to
war over allegations by President Donald Trump and
his allies that former Vice President Joseph Biden
fired a Ukrainian prosecutor to defend his son’s
handsomely compensated position on Burisma’s board.
As Biden parries
Trump’s accusations, some of the former vice
president’s most ardent defenders are emerging from
the halls of the Atlantic Council, which featured
Biden as a star speaker at its awards ceremonies
over the years. These advocates include
Michael Carpenter, Biden’s longtime foreign
policy advisor and specialist on Ukraine, who has
taken to the national media to support his embattled
boss.
Even as Burisma’s
trail of influence-buying finds its way into front
page headlines, the Atlantic Council’s partnership
with the company is scarcely mentioned. Homing in on
the partisan theater of “Ukrainegate” and tuning out
the wider landscape of corruption, the Beltway press
routinely runs quotes from Atlantic Council experts
on the scandal without acknowledging their
employer’s relationship with Hunter Biden’s former
employer.
This case of
obvious cronyism has not been overlooked because the
Atlantic Council is a bit player, but because of its
success in leveraging millions from foreign
governments, the arms and energy industries, and
Western-friendly oligarchs to bring its influence to
bear in the nation’s capital.
Biden has been
among the think tank’s most enthusiastic and
well-placed allies.
In 2011,
then-Vice President Biden delivered the keynote
address at the Atlantic Council’s distinguished
leadership awards. He returned to the think tank
again in 2014 for another keynote at its “Toward A Europe
Whole and Free”
conference, which was dedicated to expanding NATO’s
influence and countering “Russian aggression.”
Throughout the event, speakers like Zbigniew
Brzezinski sniped at Obama for his insufficiently
bellicose posture toward Russia, while former
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright fretted over
polls showing low public support for US
interventionism overseas.
In his own comments,
Biden emphasized the need to power Europe with
non-Russian sources of natural gas. This provided a
prime opportunity to Ukrainian suppliers like
Burisma and US energy titans. Many of these energy
companies, from Chevron to Noble Energy, also happen
to be top donors
to the Atlantic Council.
“This would be a
game-changer for Europe, in my view, and we’re ready
to do everything in our power to help it happen,”
Biden promised his audience.
At the time, the
Atlantic Council was pushing to ramp up the proxy
war against pro-Russian forces in Ukraine. In 2015,
for instance, the think tank helped prepare a proposal
for arming the Ukrainian military with offensive
weaponry like Javelin anti-tank missiles.
Give that the
Atlantic Council has been funded by the two
manufacturers of the Javelin system, Raytheon and
Lockheed Martin, this created at least the
appearance of a conflict of interest. In fact, the
think tank presented
its Distinguished Business Leadership Award to
Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson that same year.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
Dubious
arrangements like these are not limited to arms
manufacturers. Anders Aslund, a neoliberal economist
who helps oversee the Atlantic Council’s programming
on Russia and Eastern Europe, was quietly paid
by a consortium of Latvian banks to write an October
2017 paper highlighting the supposed progress they
had made in battling corruption.
Aslund was asked
to write the piece by Sally Painter, a longtime
lobbyist for Latvian financial institutions who was
appointed to the Atlantic Council board in 2017. At
the time, one of those banks was seeking access to
the US market and facing allegations that it had
engaged in money laundering.
Pay-for-play
collaborations have helped grow the Atlantic
Council’s annual revenue grow from $2 million to
over $20 million in the past decade. In almost every
case, the think tank has churned out policy
prescriptions that seem suited to its donors’
interests.
Government contributors
to the Atlantic Council include Gulf monarchies, the
US State Department, and various Turkish interests.
In May 2017,
Turkish President Recep Erdogan was filmed watching
as his personal guards brutalized Kurdish protesters
in Washington DC; lost in the headlines was the fact
that he was on his way into an event at the
Turkish ambassador’s residence hosted by the
Atlantic Council.
Among the think
tank’s top individual contributors is Victor
Pinchuk, one of the wealthiest people in Ukraine and
a prolific donor to the Clinton Foundation. Pinchuk
donated
$8.6 million to the Clintons’ non-profit throughout
Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
Asked if Pinchuk
was lobbying the State Department on Ukraine, his
personal foundation told the Wall Street Journal,
“this cannot be seen as anything but a good thing.”
Obama’s “point-person” on Ukraine
In mainstream
media reports about the Bidens, scarcely any
attention is given to the critical role that Joe
Biden and other Obama administration officials
played in the 2013-2014 Maidan revolt that replaced
a fairly elected,
Russian-oriented government with a Western vassal.
In a relatively sympathetic New Yorker profile
of Hunter Biden, for example, the regime change
operation was described by reporter Adam Entous as
merely “public protests.”
During the height
of the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” that played
out in Kiev’s Maidan Square, then-Assistant
Secretary of State Victoria Nuland boasted that the
US had “invested $5
billion”
since 1991 into Ukrainian civil society. On a
December 2013 tour of the Maidan, Nuland personally
handed out cookies
to protesters alongside then-US ambassador to
Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt.
In a phone conversation
that leaked two months later, the two US diplomats
could be heard plotting out the future government of
the country, discussing Ukrainian politicians as
though they were chess pieces. “I think Yats is the
guy who’s got the economic experience,” Nuland said,
essentially declaring Arseniy Yatsenyuk the next
prime minister. Frustrated with the European Union’s
reluctance to inflame tensions with Moscow, Nuland
exclaimed, “Fuck the EU.”
By Feb. 2014, the
Maidan revolt had succeeded in overthrowing
Yanukovich with the help of far-right
ultra-nationalist street muscle. With a new,
US-approved government in power, Biden assumed a
personal role in dictating Ukraine’s day-to-day
affairs.
“No one in the
U.S. government has wielded more influence over
Ukraine than Vice President Joe Biden,” Foreign
Policy noted.
The Atlantic Council also described
Biden as “the point person on Ukraine in the Obama
administration.”
“Ukraine was the
top, or one of the top three, foreign policy issues
we were concentrating on,” said
Carpenter, Biden’s foreign policy advisor. “[Biden]
was front and center.”
Biden made his
first visit to the post-Maidan government of Ukraine
in April 2014, just as Kiev was launching its
so-called “anti-terrorist operation” against
separatists who broke off from the new,
NATO-oriented Ukraine and its nationalist government
and formed so-called people’s republics in the
Russophone Donbass region. The fragmentation of the
country and its grinding proxy war flowed directly
from the regime-change operation that Biden helped
oversee.
Addressing the
parliament in Kiev, Biden declared
that “corruption can have no place in the new
Ukraine,” stating that the “United States has also
been a driving force behind the IMF, working to
provide a multi-billion package to help Ukraine..”
That same month,
Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of Burisma.
Hunter Biden starred at one of Burisma’s energy
conferences in Monaco, which are today co-sponsored
by the Atlantic Council
Burisma recruits Hunter Biden
The ouster of
Yanukovych put the founder and president of Burisma,
Mykola Zlochevsky, in a delicate spot. Zlochevsky
had served as the environment minister under
Yanukovych, handing out gas licenses to cronies.
Having watched the president flee Ukraine for his
life, currying favor with the Obama administration
was paramount for Zlochevsky.
He was also
desperate to get out of legal trouble. At the time,
a corruption investigation in the UK had resulted in
the freezing of $23 million of
Zlochevsky’s
assets. Then, in August 2014, the oligarch was
forced
to follow Yanukovych into exile after being accused
of illegally enriching himself.
The need to
refurbish Burisma’s tattered image, as well as his
own, prompted Zlochevsky to resort to a tried and
true tactic for shadowy foreign entities: forking
over large sums of money to win friends in
Washington. Hunter Biden and the Atlantic Council
were soon to become two of his best friends.
Hunter Biden was
no stranger to trading on his father’s name for
influence. He had served on the board of Amtrak, the
train line his father famously rode
more than 8,000 times, earning himself the nickname
“Amtrak Joe.” Somehow, he also rose to senior vice
president at MBNA, the bank that was the top contributor
to Joe Biden’s senate campaigns.
Moreover, the vice president’s son reaped
a board position
at the National Democratic Institute, a US-funded
“democracy promotion” organization that was heavily
involved in pushing regime change in Ukraine. And
then there was Burisma, which handed him a position
on its board despite his total lack of experience in
the energy industry and in Ukrainian affairs.
Hunter Biden
tried to repay the $50,000-a-month gig Zlochevsky
had handed him by enlisting a top DC law firm,
Boies, Schiller, and Flexner, where he served as
co-counsel, to
help “improve [Burisma’s] corporate governance.”
By the following January, Zlochevsky’s assets were
unfrozen
by the UK.
Back in
Washington, the arrangement between the son of the
vice president and a less than scrupulous Ukrainian
oligarch was raising eyebrows. During a May 13, 2014
press conference, Matt Lee of the Associated Press
grilled
State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki about Hunter
Biden’s role on Burisma’s board.
“Does this
building diplomatically have any concerns about
potential perceptions of conflict or cronyism –
which is what you’ve often accused the Russians of
doing?” Lee asked Psaki.
“No, he’s a
private citizen,” Psaki responded, referring to
Hunter Biden.
In a December
2015 op-ed, the editorial board of the New York
Times took both Bidens to
task for
the unseemly business arrangement: “It should be
plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a
Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to
help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be
sitting on.”
For a paper that
had firmly supported the installation of a
US-aligned government in Kiev, this was a striking
statement.
Hunter Biden
maintained that he had only a brief conversation
with his father about his work at Burisma. “Dad
said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I
said, ‘I do,'” Hunter recalled to the New Yorker.
Despite his
constant focus on Ukraine, the elder Biden claimed
this September that he never spoke to his son about
his business dealings in the country.
A disaster for Ukrainians, a boon for
the Bidens
On January 12,
2017, the criminal probes of Zlochevsky and Burisma
were officially closed under the watch of a new
Ukrainian prosecutor.
Less than a week
later, Biden returned to Ukraine to make his final speech
as vice president. By this point, three years after
the Maidan uprising overthrew Yanukovych, it was
clear that the national project the vice president
personally had presided over was a calamitous
failure.
As even the
Atlantic Council’s Aslund was willing to admit,
Ukraine had become the poorest country in Europe.
The country had also become the top recipient
of remittances in Europe, with a staggering
percentage of its population migrating abroad in
search of work.
Meanwhile,
Amnesty International stated:
“Ukraine is descending into chaos of uncontrolled
use of force by radical [far-right] groups. Under
these conditions, no person in Ukraine may feel
safe.” As the country’s proxy conflict with
pro-Russian separatists dragged on, it transformed
into a supermarket for the international arms trade.
Meanwhile,
Biden’s son Hunter was making a small fortune by
simply warming a seat on Burisma’s board of
directors.
During his 2017
press conference
in Kiev, Biden seemed oblivious to the trends that
were driving Ukraine into ruin. He encouraged
Ukraine’s leadership to continue on an IMF-led path
of privatization and austerity.
He
then urged Kiev to “press forward with energy
reforms that are eliminating Ukraine’s dependence on
Russian gas,” once again advancing policy that would
serve as a boon to the energy firms plowing their
cash into the Atlantic Council.
Burisma recruits the Atlantic Council
Even with Hunter
Biden on his company’s board, Zlochevsky was still
seeking influential allies in Washington. He found
them at the Atlantic Council in 2017, literally
hours after he was cleared of corruption charges in
Ukraine.
On January 19,
2017 – just two days after the investigation of
Zlochevsky ended – Burisma announced a major
“cooperative agreement” with the Atlantic Council.
“It became possible to sign a cooperative agreement
between Burisma and the Atlantic Council after all
charges against Burisma Group companies and its
owner [Mykola] Zlochevskyi were withdrawn,” the
Kyiv Post reported
at the time.
The deal was
inked by the director of the Atlantic Council’s
Eurasia program, a former US ambassador to Ukraine
named John Herbst.
Since then,
Burisma helped bankroll Atlantic Council
programming, including an
energy security conference held this May in
Monaco, where Zlochevsky currently lives.
“[Zlochevsky]
invited them purely for whitewashing purposes, to
put them on the façade and make this company look
nice,” Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of
Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, said of the
Monaco event to the Financial Times.
At one such
conference in Monaco, then-Burisma board member
Hunter Biden declared, “One of the reasons that I am
proud to be a member of the board at Burisma is that
I believe we are trying to figure out the way to
create a radical change in the way we look at
energy.” (Hunter Biden left Burisma with $850,000 in
earnings when his father launched his presidential
campaign this year).
While the
Atlantic Council was bringing Burisma in from the
cold, the company was still too toxic for much of
the business world to touch.
As the Financial
Times noted,
the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine had
rejected Burisma’s application for membership.
“We’ve never worked with them for integrity reasons.
Never passed our due diligence,” a Western financial
institution told the newspaper.
“The company just
does not pass the smell test,” a businessman in
Ukraine commented to the Financial Times. “Their
reputation is far from squeaky clean because of
their baggage, the background and attempts to
whitewash by bringing in recognizable Western names
on to the board.”
In fact, a year
before the Atlantic Council initiated its
partnership with Burisma, the think tank published
a paper
describing Zlochevsky as “openly on the take” and
deriding board members Hunter Biden and former
Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski as his
“trophy foreigners.” (Kwasniewski is today a member
of the Atlantic Council’s international advisory
board).
For Herbst,
however, Burisma’s generosity seemed too hard to
resist.
“If there are
companies that want to support my work, if those
companies are not doing anything that I know to be
illegal or unethical, I’ll consider their support,”
Herbst stated in reply to questions about the
Burisma partnership from the Ukrainian news site,
Hromadske.
“They’ve been
good partners,” he added.
Men of integrity
The Atlantic
Council has provided more than just a web of
influence for figures like Biden and Zlochevsky. It
extended into the Trump administration, through a
former employee who served as the president’s lead
envoy to Ukraine.
On the sidelines
of a September 2018 Atlantic Council event in New
York City, Burisma advisor Vadym Pozharskyi held a
meeting
with Kurt Volker, then the State Department Special
Liaison to Ukraine. A former senior
advisor
to the Atlantic Council and national security
hardliner, Volker had earned praise from Biden as a
“solid guy.”
At the time,
Volker also served as the executive director of the
McCain Institute, named for the senator, John
McCain, who authored the congressional provision
requiring the US to budget 20 percent of all aid to
Ukraine for offensive weapons. As I reported
in 2017, the McCain Institute’s financial backers
included the BGR group, whose designated lobbyist,
Ed Rogers, was a lobbyist for Raytheon – the company
that produced the Javelin missiles that both Volker
and the Atlantic Council wanted sold to Ukraine.
Following his
abrupt resignation this September, Volker was called
to testify before the House of Representatives
Committee on Foreign Affairs on the so-called
Ukrainegate affair. There, he defended
Biden as “a man of integrity and dedication to our
country” who would never be “influenced in his
duties as Vice President by money for his son…”
Biden’s chief advisor on
Ukraine goes to work for Burisma’s favorite DC think
tank
Throughout
Biden’s tenure as the “point person” on Ukraine, one
figure was constantly by his side: Michael
Carpenter, a former Pentagon specialist on Eastern
Europe who became a key advisor to Biden on the
National Security Council. When Carpenter traveled
with Biden to Ukraine in 2015, he helped provide
the Vice President with talking points throughout
his trip.
Once Trump was
inaugurated, Carpenter followed fellow members of
the Democratic foreign policy apparatus into the
think tank world. He accepted a fellowship
at the Atlantic Council, and assumed a position as
senior director of newly founded Penn Biden Center
for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which provided
office space to Biden when he was in Washington.
At the January
23, 2018 Council on Foreign Relations event where
Biden made his now-notorious comments about
threatening the Ukrainian government with the
withdrawal of a one billion dollar loan if it did
not fire Shokin – “well son of a bitch, he got
fired!” Biden exclaimed
– Carpenter was by his side, rattling off tough
talking points about Russian interference
Months later,
Carpenter staged a meltdown on Twitter over the
incident, fabricating
quotes by me, branding me
as a “sleeze” [sic] and “pro-Asad and pro-Putin
scumbag,” while falsely and baselessly claiming I
“enlist[ed] RT,” the Russian-backed news network,
“to do an exposé on him.”
Asked by The
Grayzone about Carpenter’s work for a think tank
funded by Burisma while simultaneously involving
himself in Biden’s political machine, Atlantic
Council media relations deputy director Alex Kisling
stated, “Council staff and fellows are free to
participate in election activity as individuals and
on their own time, provided they do so in a way that
could not be seen as acting as a representative of
the Council or implying Council endorsement of their
activity or views. Michael’s affiliations and
previous service are on our website. (He is not part
of our full time staff).”
The Penn Biden
Center did not respond to a question on whether it
supported Carpenter’s work at the Burisma-backed
Atlantic Council.
The Beltway press scrubs
Burisma’s ongoing influence-buying
As the scrutiny of
Biden’s dealings in Ukraine intensifies, Carpenter
has thrust himself into the media limelight to
defend his longtime boss.
In an October 7
Washington Post op-ed
denouncing Trump’s “smear campaign” against Biden,
Carpenter insisted that Biden had gone to great
lengths to remove the Ukrainian prosecutor, Shokin,
for his failure to take action against Burisma. That
evening, Carpenter took to Rachel
Maddow’s show
on MSNBC to reinforce the message that Biden moved
against “corrupt players” in Ukraine, presumably
referring to Burisma.
At no point did he
mention that Burisma was funding the think tank that
hosted him as a senior fellow.
In publishing an
“explainer”
purporting to debunk the charges against Biden, the
Atlantic Council also failed to mention its ongoing
relationship with Burisma. Atlantic Council media
relations deputy director Kisling dismissed the
non-disclosure, telling The Grayzone, “The Council
discloses its funding from Burisma on its website
and whenever asked.” (Ironically, the Atlantic
Council has pushed for
greater transparency in political advertising on
Facebook, one of the top donors to the think tank).
Perhaps the most
absurd omission took place in a GQ article
about Ukrainegate by reporter and Russia-watcher
Julia Ioffe. In painting Ukraine – the largest
nation entirely located in Europe – as a “small
country” drowning in corruption, Ioffe noted, “the
best way to launder one’s shady reputation and shine
for international investors is to hire big-name
Western consultants – as Burisma did.”
In the very next
paragraph, Ioffe quoted Daniel Fried, a former State
Department official now serving as a senior fellow
at the Atlantic Council. “It’s a country where
there’s a lot of freelance money and a lot of
competing interests,” Fried remarked.
Revealingly, Ioffe
failed to acknowledge that Fried was one of those
“big-named Western consultants” helping to launder
Zlochevsky and Burisma’s “shady reputation” through
the Atlantic Council.
In fact, Fried was
photographed
in a one-on-one meeting with Burisma advisor Vadim
Pozharskyi at a September 2018 Atlantic Council
conference in New York City.
As the furor over
“Ukrainegate” continues, Biden and his allies are
soldiering ahead, insisting that scrutiny of his
activities in Ukraine constitute nothing more than a
vast right-wing conspiracy.
Meanwhile, the
Beltway press shrugs at Burisma’s buying of
influence at a powerful think tank intertwined with
Biden’s political operation.
Russia might be a
“kleptocracy” and Ukraine might endemically corrupt,
but in Washington, this is all business as usual.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist
and the author of several books, including
best-selling
Republican Gomorrah, Goliath,
The Fifty One Day War, and
The Management of Savagery. He has produced
print articles for an array of publications, many
video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing
Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to
shine a journalistic light on America’s state of
perpetual war and its dangerous domestic
repercussions.
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