Former vice president Joe Biden’s extraordinary
campaign memo this week imploring U.S. news media to reject the
allegations surrounding his son Hunter’s work for a Ukrainian natural
gas company makes several bold declarations.
The memo by Biden campaign aides Kate Bedingfield and Tony Blinken
specifically warned reporters covering the impeachment trial they would
be acting as “enablers of misinformation” if they repeated allegations
that the former vice president forced the firing of Ukraine’s top
prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma Holdings, where Hunter Biden
worked as a highly compensated board member.
Biden’s memo argues there is no evidence that the former vice
president’s or Hunter Biden’s conduct raised any concern, and that
Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s investigation was “dormant” when the
vice president forced the prosecutor to be fired in Ukraine.
The
memo
calls the allegation a “conspiracy theory” (and, in full disclosure, blames my reporting for
the allegations surfacing last year.)
But
the memo omits critical impeachment testimony and other evidence that paint a
far different portrait than Biden’s there’s-nothing-to-talk-about-here rebuttal.
Here
are the facts, with links to public evidence, so you can decide for yourself.
Fact: Joe Biden
admitted to forcing Shokin’s firing in March 2016.
It
is irrefutable, and not a conspiracy theory, that Joe Biden bragged in
this 2018 speech to a foreign policy group that he threatened in March 2016
to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Kiev if then-Ukraine’s president Petro
Poroshenko didn’t immediately fire Shokin.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be
leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said:
‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting
the money,’” Biden told the 2018 audience in recounting what he told Poroshenko
“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place
someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations
event.
Fact: Shokin’s prosecutors were actively investigating
Burisma when he was fired.
While some news organizations cited by the Biden memo have reported
the investigation was “dormant” in March 2016, official files released by the
Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office, in fact, show there was substantial investigative
activity in the weeks just before Joe Biden forced Shokin’s firing.
The corruption investigations into Burisma and its founder began
in 2014. Around the same time, Hunter Biden and his U.S. business partner Devon
Archer were added
to Burisma’s board, and their Rosemont Seneca Bohais firm began receiving regular
$166,666 monthly payments, which totaled nearly $2 million a year. Both banks
records seized by the FBI in America and Burisma’s
own ledgers in Ukraine confirm these payments.
To put the payments in perspective, the annual amounts paid by
Burisma to Hunter Biden’s and Devon Archer’s Rosemont Seneca Bohais firm were 30
times the average median annual household income for everyday Americans.
For a period of time in 2015, those investigations were stalled as
Ukraine was creating a new FBI-like law enforcement agency known as the
National Anti-Corruption Bureau ((NABU) to investigate endemic
corruption in the former Soviet republic.
There was friction between NABU and the prosecutor general’s office
for a while. And then in September 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine
Geoffrey Pyatt demanded more action in the Burisma investigation. You
can read his speech here. Activity ramped up extensively soon after.
In December 2015, the prosecutor’s files show, Shokin’s office
transferred the evidence it had gathered against Burisma to NABU for investigation.
In early February 2016, Shokin’s office secured a court order
allowing prosecutors to re-seize some of the Burisma founder’s property, including
his home and luxury car, as part of the ongoing probe.
Two weeks later, in mid-February 2016, Latvian law enforcement sent
this alert to Ukrainian prosecutors flagging several payments from Burisma
to American accounts as “suspicious.” The payments included some monies to Hunter
Biden’s and Devon Archer’s firm. Latvian
authorities recently confirmed it sent the alert.
Shokin told both me and ABC News that just before he was fired under pressure from Joe Biden he also was making plans to interview Hunter Biden.
Fact: Burisma’s lawyers in 2016 were pressing U.S.
and Ukrainian authorities to end the corruption investigations.
Burisma’s main U.S. lawyer John Buretta acknowledged in this
February 2017 interview with a Ukraine newspaper that the company remained under
investigation in 2016, until he negotiated for one case to be dismissed and the
other to be settled by payment of a large tax penalty.
Documents
released under an open records lawsuit show Burisma legal team was
pressuring the State Department in February 2016 to end the corruption allegations
against the gas firm and specifically invoked Hunter Biden’s name as part of
the campaign. You can read those documents here.
In addition, immediately after Joe Biden succeeded in getting
Shokin ousted, Burisma’s lawyers sought to meet with his successor as chief
prosecutor to settle the case. Here
is the Ukrainian prosecutors’ summary memo of one of their meetings with
the firm’s lawyers.
Fact: There
is substantial evidence Joe Biden and his office knew about the Burisma probe and
his son’s role as a board member.
The New York Times reported in this December 2015 article
that the Burisma investigation was ongoing and Hunter Biden’s role in
the company was undercutting Joe Biden’s push to fight Ukrainian
corruption. The article quoted the vice president’s office.
In addition, Hunter Biden acknowledged in
this interview he had discussed his Burisma job with his father on one
occasion and that his father responded by saying he hoped the younger Biden
knew what he was doing.
Fact: Federal
Ethics rules requires government officials to avoid taking policy actions affecting
close relatives.
Office
of Government Ethics rules require all government officials to recuse
themselves from any policy actions that could impact a close relative or cause
a reasonable person to see the appearance of a conflict of interest or question
their impartiality.
“The impartiality rule requires an employee to consider appearance
concerns before participating in a particular matter if someone close to the employee
is involved as a party to the matter,” these rules state. “This requirement to
refrain from participating (or recuse) is designed to avoid the appearance of favoritism
in government decision-making.”
Fact: Multiple
State Department officials testified the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine created the
appearance of a conflict of interest.
In House impeachment testimony,
Obama-era State Department officials declared the juxtaposition of Joe
Biden overseeing Ukraine policy, including the anti-corruption efforts,
at the same his son Hunter worked for a Ukraine gas firm under
corruption investigation created the appearance of a conflict of
interest.
In fact, deputy assistant secretary George Kent said he was so
concerned by Burisma’s corrupt reputation that he blocked
a project the State Department had with Burisma and tried to warn Joe
Biden’s office about the concerns about an apparent conflict of interest.
Likewise, the House Democrats’ star impeachment witness, former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovich, agreed
the Bidens’ role in Ukraine created an ethic issue. “I think that it
could raise the appearance of a conflict of interest,” she testified. You can read her testimony here.
Fact: Hunter Biden acknowleged he
may have gotten his Burisma job solely because of his last name.
In this
interview last summer, Hunter Biden said it might have been a “mistake” to
serve on the Burisma board and that it was possible he was hired simply because
of his proximity to the vice president.
“If
your last name wasn’t Biden, do you think you would’ve been asked to be on the
board of Burisma?,” a reporter asked.
“I
don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not, in retrospect,” Hunter Biden
answered. “But that’s — you know — I don’t think that there’s a lot of
things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.”
Fact: Ukraine
law enforcement reopened the Burisma investigation in early 2019, well before
President Trump mentioned the matter to Ukraine’s new president Vlodymyr
Zelensky.
This may be the single biggest under-reported fact in the impeachment scandal: four months before
Trump and Zelensky had their infamous phone call, Ukraine law
enforcement officials officially reopened their investigation into
Burisma and its founder.
The effort began independent of Trump or his lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s
legal work. In fact, it was NABU – the very agency Joe Biden and the
Obama administration helped start – that recommended in February 2019 to
reopen the probe.
NABU
director Artem Sytnyk made
this announcement that he was recommending a new notice of suspicion be opened
to launch the case against Burisma and its founder because of new evidence
uncovered by detectives.
Ukrainian officials said that new evidence included records
suggesting a possible money laundering scheme dating to 2010 and
continuing until 2015.
A month
later in March 2019, Deputy Prosecutor General Konstantin Kulyk officially
filed this
notice of suspicion re-opening the case.
And
Reuters recently quoted Ukrainian officials as saying the ongoing
probe was expanded to allegations of theft of public funds.
The implications of this timetable are significant to the Trump
impeachment trial because the president couldn’t have pressured Ukraine
to re-open the investigation in July 2019 when Kiev had already done so
on its own, months earlier.
For a complete
timeline of all the key events in the Ukraine scandal, you can click here.
