Try as they might, the mainstream media can’t hide the truth about the Biden-Burisma scandal, which has blown up again thanks to President Trump’s phone call of July 25 with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Hate-Trump leftists on Capitol Hill would use that call to impeach Trump because he asked Zelensky to get to the bottom of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s strong-arming Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor in March 2016. That prosecutor was probing a company that employed a consultancy in which Biden’s son, Hunter, was a principal.
But Biden-Burisma documents published by John Solomon of The Hill show that Joe Biden very likely lied in explaining his role in the matter, and that when he was vice president, he used his office to enrich and protect his son.
Prosecutor Not Corrupt
As Solomon reported late yesterday, then-Vice President Biden claims he pushed then-President Petro Poroshenko to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin because he “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.”
But “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,” Solomon reported.
Indeed, they don’t just conflict. They show that Biden likely moved against Shokin to protect Burisma and his son, and to “stop prosecutors’ plans to interview Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
The proof?
In a meeting with Ukraine’s temporary prosecutor, Yuriy Sevruk, after Biden torpedoed Shokin, Burisma Holdings’ American legal team “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.”
Burisma’s team included a lobbying firm, run by two former Clinton administration employees, that paid a Ukrainian embassy official for help to set up that meeting.
If Biden is telling the truth — that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees if Shokin wasn’t fired because Shokin was corrupt — then why, Solomon asked, would Burisma’s legal team say those claims were false?
Second, if sacking Shokin was unrelated to the Burisma probe as Joe Biden claims, Solomon continued, why did the Burisma protection squad contact the new prosecutor “within hours of the termination and urgently seek a meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case?”
Probe Hadn’t Ended
The Biden-Burisma scandal surfaced in December 2015, when the New York Times reported that Bursima hired Hunter Biden shortly after President Obama put Biden senior in charge of U.S.-Ukraine relations. But “that story also alerted Biden’s office that Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin had an active investigation of Burisma and its founder,” Solomon continued.
As well:
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.”
Solomon has sued the State Department to get records of that meeting to find out whether Hunter Biden used the department to help his business while his father was vice president.
And that business having been helped, did Biden senior push out Shokin to protect it?
Shokin told Solomon that 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.”
Solomon’s documents include an affidavit from Shokin, who “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,” Shokin said, “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.”
Central to Biden senior’s claim that he pushed out Shokin because of corruption is the corollary claim, which has appeared in some media reports, that the prosecutor’s office had closed its investigation of Burisma. But the Burisma probe was alive and well.
“The Ukraine Prosecutor General’s office still had two open inquiries in March 2016, according to the official case file,” Solomon reported. “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.”
One of those false reports surfaced in the Washington Post just yesterday. Noting that the probe in Burisma was “dormant,” it quoted a former Ukrainian prosecutor as saying Hunter Biden did nothing wrong.
Maybe, but his activities implicate his father, the leading Democratic candidate for president, in a major influence-peddling scheme when he was vice president.
Photo: AP Images
