As a result of a FOIA lawsuit journalist John Solomon has received emails between the Burisma energy company and U.S. State Department; where Burisma seeking U.S. government assistance to get the Ukraine prosecutor to drop a corruption probe against the energy co., and leveraging Hunter Biden’s board membership toward their efforts.
Hunter Biden and his Ukrainian gas firm colleagues had multiple contacts with the Obama State Department during the 2016 election cycle, including one just a month before Vice President Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating his son’s company for corruption, newly released memos show.
During that February 2016 contact, a U.S. representative for Burisma Holdings sought a meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine A. Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the Ukrainian firm where Hunter Biden worked as a board member, according to memos obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. (I filed that suit this summer with the help of the public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.)
Just three weeks before Burisma’s overture to State, Ukrainian authorities raided the home of the oligarch who owned the gas firm and employed Hunter Biden, a signal the long-running corruption probe was escalating in the middle of the U.S. presidential election.
Hunter Biden’s name, in fact, was specifically invoked by the Burisma representative as a reason the State Department should help, according to a series of email exchanges among U.S. officials trying to arrange the meeting. The subject line for the email exchanges read simply “Burisma.”
“Per our conversation, Karen Tramontano of Blue Star Strategies requested a meeting to discuss with U/S Novelli USG remarks alleging Burisma (Ukrainian energy company) of corruption,” a Feb. 24, 2016, email between State officials read. “She noted that two high profile U.S. citizens are affiliated with the company (including Hunter Biden as a board member).
“Tramontano would like to talk with U/S Novelli about getting a better understanding of how the U.S. came to the determination that the company is corrupt,” the email added. “According to Tramontano there is no evidence of corruption, has been no hearing or process, and evidence to the contrary has not been considered.”
At the time, Novelli was the most senior official overseeing international energy issues for State. The undersecretary position, of which there are several, is the third-highest-ranking job at State, behind the secretary and deputy secretary. And Tramontano was a lawyer working for Blue Star Strategies, a Washington firm that was hired by Burisma to help end a long-running corruption investigation against the gas firm in Ukraine.
Tramontano and another Blue Star official, Sally Painter, both alumni of Bill Clinton’s administration, worked with New York-based criminal defense attorney John Buretta to settle the Ukraine cases in late 2016 and 2017. I wrote about their efforts previously here.
Burisma Holdings records obtained by Ukrainian prosecutors state the gas firm made a $60,000 payment to Blue Star in November 2015.
The emails show Tramontano was scheduled to meet Novelli on March 1, 2016, and that State Department officials were scrambling to get answers ahead of time from the U.S. embassy in Kiev.
The records don’t show whether the meeting actually took place. The FOIA lawsuit is ongoing and State officials are slated to produce additional records in the months ahead.
But the records do indicate that Hunter Biden’s fellow American board member at Burisma, Devon Archer, secured a meeting on March 2, 2016 with Secretary of State John Kerry. In addition to serving on the Burisma board, Archer and Hunter Biden were partners at an American firm known as Rosemont Seneca.
“Devon Archer coming to see S today at 3pm – need someone to meet/greet him at C Street,” an email from Kerry’s office manager reads. “S” is a shorthand frequently used in State emails to describe the Secretary of State. The memos don’t state the reason for the meeting.
Tramontano, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, Archer and Joe Biden’s campaign did not return messages seeking comment on Monday.
In an interview with ABC News last month, Hunter Biden said he believed he had done “nothing wrong at all” while working with Burisma but “was it poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is…a swamp in — in — in many ways? Yeah.”
Whatever the subject of the Archer-Kerry meeting, its existence is certain to spark interest. That’s because Secretary Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz, had been a business partner with both Archer and Hunter Biden at the Rosemont Seneca investment firm in the United States.
Heinz, however, chose not to participate in the Burisma dealings. In fact, he wrote an email to his stepfather’s top aides in May 2014, pointedly distancing himself from the decision by Hunter Biden and Devon Archer to join Burisma’s board.
Heinz’s spokesman recently told The Washington Post that Heinz ended his relationship with Archer and Hunter Biden partly over the Burisma matter. “The lack of judgment in this matter was a major catalyst for Mr. Heinz ending his business relationships with Mr. Archer and Mr. Biden,” Heinz spokesman Chris Bastardi told the newspaper
A person who assisted Blue Star and Buretta in settling the Burisma matters in Ukraine told me in an interview that the late February 2016 overture to State was prompted by a dramatic series of events in Ukraine that included when that country’s top prosecutor escalated a two-year probe into Burisma and its founder, the oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky.
Zlochevsky’s gas firm hired Hunter Biden and Archer as board members for Burisma Holdings in spring 2014, around the time that British officials opened corruption investigations into Zlochevsky’s gas firm for actions dating to 2010 before Hunter Biden and Archer joined the firm. Ukraine officials opened their own corruption probe in August 2014.
A firm called Rosemont Seneca Bohai began receiving monthly payments totaling more than $166,000 from Burisma Holdings in May 2014, bank records show. The records show Devon Archer was listed as a custodian for the Rosemont Seneca Bohai firm and that Hunter Biden received payments from it. You can read those bank records here.
In September 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt gave a speech imploring Ukrainian prosecutors to do more to bring Zlochevsky to justice, according to published reports at the time.
By early 2016 the Ukrainian investigation had advanced enough that then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin authorized a court-ordered seizure of Zlochevsky’s home and other valuables, including a luxury car. That seizure occurred on Feb. 2, 2016, according to published reports in Ukraine.
The same day that the Zlochevsky seizure was announced in Ukraine, Hunter Biden used his Twitter account to start following Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, a longtime national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden who was promoted to the No. 2 job at State under Secretary John Kerry.
The Feb. 4, 2016 Twitter notification from Hunter Biden to Blinken was captured by State email servers and turned over to me as part of the FOIA release.
Within a few weeks of Tramontano’s overture to Novelli and of Archer’s overture to Kerry, Vice President Joe Biden took a stunning action, one that has enveloped his 2020 campaign for president in controversy.
By his own admission in a 2018 speech, Joe Biden used the threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid to strong-arm Ukraine into firing Shokin, a prosecutor that he and his office knew was investigating Burisma.
Biden has said he forced Shokin’s firing because he and Western allies believed the prosecutor wasn’t aggressive enough in fighting corruption.
Shokin disputes that account, telling both me and ABC News that he was fired specifically because he would not stand down from investigating Burisma. In fact, Shokin alleges, he was making plans to interview Hunter Biden about his Burisma work and payments when he got the axe.
Ukraine prosecutors have said they do not believe the Bidens did anything wrong under Ukraine law. But some of the country’s prosecutors made an effort in 2018 to get information about Burisma to the U.S. Justice Department because they believed American prosecutors might be interested in some activities under U.S. law. You can read about that effort here.
Some experts and officials have been quoted in reports saying Joe Biden’s actions created the appearance of a conflict of interest, something all U.S. government officials are supposed to avoid. The questions about conflicts were previously raised in a 2015 article by the New York Times and the 2018 book Secret Empires by author Peter Schweizer.
The new evidence of contacts between Burisma, Hunter Biden and Archer at State are certain to add a new layer of intrigue to the debate. Those contacts span back to at least spring 2015, the new memos show.
On May 22, 2015, Hunter Biden emailed his father’s longtime trusted aide, Blinken, with the following message: “Have a few minutes next week to grab a cup of coffee? I know you are impossibly busy, but would like to get your advice on a couple of things, Best, Hunter.”
Blinken responded the same day with an “absolutely” and added, “Look forward to seeing you.”
The records indicate the two men were scheduled to meet the afternoon of May 27, 2015.
The State Department records also indicate Hunter Biden met Blinken in person for lunch on July 22, 2015, when State officials gave the name of a person to meet to help him enter the building. “He has the VIP pin and can escort you upstairs for your lunch with Tony,” the email said.
The emails don’t indicate whether the meeting had to do with Burisma or one of Hunter Biden’s other interests.
But they clearly show that Hunter Biden, his business partner and Burisma’s legal team were able to secure contacts inside the State Department, including to one of his father’s most trusted aides, to Secretary Kerry and to the agency’s top energy official.
The question now is: Did any of those contacts prompt further action or have anything to do with Joe Biden’s conduct in Ukraine in March 2016 when he forced Shokin’s firing?
22 comments:
Re: "Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating his son's company for corruption" -- John Solomon is a liar. Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor because he was corrupt. Corruption that INCLUDED him doing a very bad job investigating Burisma.
Quote: ...it quickly became apparent that Shokin had little interest in actually uprooting any corruption percolating within Burisma, or within Zlochevsky's network. According to former members of Shokin's staff -- including one, Vitaliy Kasko, who reiterated a few months ago that Biden never pressured anyone to avoid looking into [Burisma] -— Shokin ignored offers of aid from foreign partners to track Zlochevsky's international financial network. In particular, Shokin effectively ignored the UK's move to freeze tens of millions of dollars allegedly attached to Zlochevsky, identified during a money-laundering investigation directly tied to the ousted Ukrainian regime.
Even after Britain's Serious Fraud Office pronounced that the funds linked to Zlochevsky were "believed to be the proceeds of... criminal conduct", Shokin didn't budge. He and his office declined, time and again, to send London the documents necessary to link the frozen funds to Zlochevsky's kleptocratic malfeasance". [end quote].
The supposed request in this email -- FROM *who knows* TO *who knows* -- was obviously ignored. Because "what the former vice president did was make the prosecution of [Burisma] more likely, not less".
Your quote was from 2014, 2 years before...
By early 2016 the Ukrainian investigation had advanced enough that then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin authorized a court-ordered seizure of Zlochevsky’s home and other valuables, including a luxury car. That seizure occurred on Feb. 2, 2016, according to published reports in Ukraine.
The same day that the Zlochevsky seizure was announced in Ukraine, Hunter Biden used his Twitter account to start following Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, a longtime national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden who was promoted to the No. 2 job at State under Secretary John Kerry.
The Feb. 4, 2016 Twitter notification from Hunter Biden to Blinken was captured by State email servers and turned over to me as part of the FOIA release.
Within a few weeks of Tramontano’s overture to Novelli and of Archer’s overture to Kerry, Vice President Joe Biden took a stunning action, one that has enveloped his 2020 campaign for president in controversy.
By his own admission in a 2018 speech, Joe Biden used the threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid to strong-arm Ukraine into firing Shokin, a prosecutor that he and his office knew was investigating Burisma.
Biden has said he forced Shokin’s firing because he and Western allies believed the prosecutor wasn’t aggressive enough in fighting corruption.
Shokin disputes that account, telling both me and ABC News that he was fired specifically because he would not stand down from investigating Burisma. In fact, Shokin alleges, he was making plans to interview Hunter Biden about his Burisma work and payments when he got the axe.
Shokin was kicking Burisma's ass and Hunter's job was to get him off it.
Quote: Others have rightly pointed out that, in reality, Biden was not simply relaying the message pushed by the Obama administration, but that his position was supported by Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, European allies, and even groups like the International Monetary Foundation (IMF). As Tom Malinowski, former assistant secretary of state under Obama, recalled this week, "All of us working on Ukraine wanted this prosecutor gone, because he was NOT prosecuting corruption. So did the Europeans. So did the IMF. This didn't come from Joe Biden -— he just delivered our message". [end quote].
Shokin is going to say something other than "of course I'm not corrupt"? According to you these many other players that said Shokin was corrupt (and should be fired) were ALL doing the corrupt bidding of Joe Biden? If so, there must be MANY people who could flip and tell the "truth". Has ONE come forward yet? Is he or she talking to oranges investigator Toady Barr?
Acta non verba.
On February 2, 2016 the Prosecutor seized the oligarch assets. That doesn't quite square with any argument that the prosecutor is being "too lenient" on him and then the Prosecutor getting fired in March of 2016.
THAT corresponds more directly with Hunter Biden and company meeting with and arranging for State Department officials (on 2/4/16) to back off Burisma in Fenruary of 2016.
Quote: As Prosecutor General, [Shokin] was accused of blocking major cases against allies and influential figures and hindering the fight against corruption in Ukraine. Various street protests demanding Shokin's resignation were held. ... In March 2016 his office carried out a raid against one of Ukraine's leading anti-corruption groups, the Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC), claiming that it had misappropriated aid money. AntAC was a frequent critic of the Prosecutor General's Office under Shokin. In one notorious case, two of Shokin's prosecutors were caught with stashes of diamonds, cash and valuables in their homes, likely indicating bribery. Prosecutors from another department of Shokin's office were fired or reassigned when they attempted to bring a prosecution against the so-called "diamond prosecutors". [end quote].
Evidence supporting the accusation that Shokin was corrupt and that corruption wasn't just an excuse used to end his alleged investigation into Burisma. Where the street protesters paid off by Hunter or his son Joe? Was the Anti-Corruption Action Center paid off by Joe Biden or his dad Hunter?
BTW, Interfax-Ukraine, the "news" site you link to, is Russian owned. I surely do not trust any "news" article on this site.
AntAC is George Soros group. George isn't an oligarch? Who knew?
"Corruption" was the watchword used by American/European IMF oligarchs to depose/eliminate competition from Russian/Ukrainian AND Ukrainian/Ukrainian ones.
And the Obama/Biden/Clinton/Kerry "nepotism" exposes the American/European Foundation donating oligarchs like Soros.
:)
Those Clinton Foundation donations sure get results!
Gee, if Shokin had been left in place, the whole Democrat-Ukrainian scheme to swing the election for Hillary could have been exposed.
Poor Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz wouldn't be able to get BS Ukrainian Oil gigs if the AntAC groups hadn't been "institutionalized".
AntAC is George Soros group.
It isn't.
Quote: Soros doesn’t control AntAC's activities. It is instead operated by Ukrainian activists.
Who is behind the "Clinton Foundation Timeline"? The "about us" page only says "We are a grass root community" -- to which I say, BULLSHIT. Looks like a "smear the Clinton Foundation with BS and lies" site to me.
...the whole Democrat-Ukrainian scheme to swing the election for Hillary could have been exposed.
No. Given that most of the bogus oranges counter-narrative invented after the election. btw, what is so ridiculous about this bullshit is that a better (and much easier) "scheme" would have been for HRC to campaign in WI and MI. Yet, instead of doing that, she and her team came up with an elaborate, convoluted, and complex conspiracy to frame Dotard and Putin? Give me a f*cking break.
From 2013 to 2015, Soros’ philanthropies gave more than $1 million to Transparency International, according to the organization’s financial statements. The Anti-Corruption Action Centre received $210,000 from Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation between 2013 and 2016. Soros’ Open Society Foundation also donated to the center, according to the NGO’s own annual reports, but specific funding amounts were not disclosed.
Oooops.
...and yes, Hillary is THAT stupid.
God bless George Soros. FYI, donating money to an organization because you like the work they are doing does not mean you then run that organization. AntAC is not a "George Soros group".
No, it's worse. It's a George Soros purchased shell NGO.
If George Soros wanted Joe Biden's Dad Hunter to get rich, why didn't he hire him as a consultant? There are MUCH easier ways to give money to people.
Because Soros has already maxed out on direct donations to Biden's "For the People" SuperPAC and needed new "straw" donors?
That (even if true) has nothing to do with -- and would have in no way prevented -- George Soros hiring Hunter Biden as a consultant. If he just wanted Hunter to get rich that would have been the logical thing to do.
Hunter Biden has information useful to George Soros? Must not be true, or Soros would have probably hired him.
What Hunter COULD do for Soros was get rid of the pesky prosecutor looking into Soro's phony Anti-Corruption smear operation.
That is f*cking stupid. Why would George Soros not hire Hunter Biden because he could provide him with no useful information YET go to the trouble and expense of funding an anti-corruption organization to protect himself from a "pesky prosecutor" -- when said protection would be unnecessary if he simply hired Hunter Biden? Soros isn't receiving "useful information" either way. And simply hiring Hunter Biden would surely be cheaper and involve zero legal peril. Your explanation makes absolutely no sense and contains circular logic.
Soros is a "hedger." Every bet is hedged.
Your explanation makes absolutely no sense and contains circular logic.
Post a Comment