Three days ago, a top State Department official told the House Intelligence Committee that the Obama administration orchestrated the firing of the general prosecutor in Ukraine while he was investigating the company that employed former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
But he also told the panel this: When he tried to warn the vice president about the possible conflict of interest, one of Biden’s handlers dismissed him.
George Kent, deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, offered that testimony in secret, but as with all secrets in the nation’s capital, it was bound to leak.
Kent’s testimony proved two things. First, that Obama led the effort to get rid of Viktor Shokin, who was probing Burisma Holdings, the company that employed and enriched Hunter Biden. Second, no one around the vice president worried about his son’s business dealings there.
Post Report
The latest on the Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scandal appeared in today’s Washington Post, which cited “three people familiar with the testimony.”
Kent “raised concerns in early 2015 about then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son serving on the board of a Ukrainian energy company but was turned away by a Biden staffer,” the Post reported.
He “worried that Hunter Biden’s position at the firm Burisma Holdings would complicate efforts by U.S. diplomats to convey to Ukrainian officials the importance of avoiding conflicts of interest.”
In other words, Kent worried about what Joe Biden should have worried about: that Hunter Biden’s sudden prominence in Ukraine would appear to influence his father, Obama’s man on Ukraine.
But when Kent raised the issue with Biden’s office, he was told the then-vice president didn’t have the “bandwidth” to deal with the issue involving his son as his other son, Beau, was battling cancer, said the people familiar with his testimony….
Although many of Trump’s charges regarding Hunter Biden have been unfounded, the elder Biden has faced questions about why he didn’t anticipate concerns about potential conflicts of interest as he took a leading role in carrying out U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Polls show Biden with an advantage over Trump in a potential general election matchup, and Biden has sought in recent days to focus attention on the actions of a president many Democrats see as corrupt and unfit for office.
Amazingly, one of Biden’s top national security aides told the Post that he didn’t remember hearing Kent’s objections. Why, the aide asked, would anyone think anything bad about Joe Biden.
“I don’t understand what the optics thing means other than someone thinking it looked bad in a political way,” the aide said. “Did it have any effect on US policies, either on what we were doing or what the Ukrainians were doing? It didn’t…. In the aggregate it didn’t have any discernible effect.”
The aide said that Joe Biden was dealing with a lot during Beau Biden’s bout with cancer, but that it had a minimal impact on his work.
“Day to day the vice president was at work and he was pretty focused,” the aide said. “Does that mean it’s inconceivable that someone said, ‘Hey look it’s not the time to raise a family issue?’ I guess it’s conceivable. But I never saw evidence he wasn’t capable of doing the VP role and dealing with his family at the same time.”
For their part, Biden and his handlers are sticking to their story: He was fighting corruption when he threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees if Ukraine didn’t pink slip Shokin, who just happened to be investigating Burisma, the energy company that paid Hunter Biden a fortune and put him on its board, despite his lack of qualifications and notoriety as raging drug addict.
Biden claims he “did nothing wrong.”
It Won’t Go Away
The truth of that claim remains to be seen, given what the Democrats have inadvertently done by focusing their impeachment effort on President Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25.
During that call, Trump asked Zelensky to look again at Biden/Burisma and Ukraine’s possible involvement in the 2016 election, which the anonymous CIA whistleblower claimed were invitations for “foreign interference” in the 2020 election.
If Trump is impeached, as The New American reported, his attorneys will surely call upon top Democrats to testify under oath, including Biden and likely Hillary Clinton, whose campaign, along with the Democratic National Committee, colluded with Ukrainians to collect anti-Trump dirt.
Photo: AP Images
