Miranda Devine: Secret emails show Joe Biden met with son Hunter’s Ukraine client
Joe Biden long denied that he had anything to do with his sleazy son Hunter’s Ukrainian clients. Now, emails recovered from an abandoned laptop tell a different story, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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Joe Biden repeatedly has denied knowing anything about his druggie son Hunter’s lucrative appointment to the board of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
“Hunter Biden is a private citizen and a lawyer. The vice president does not endorse any particular company and has no involvement with this company,” a spokeswoman for Joe Biden said in a December 2015, statement to the New York Times.
The former VP has stonewalled on the topic ever since.
“I’ve never discussed my business or their business, my sons’ or daughter’s. And I’ve never discussed them because they know where I have to do my job and that’s it and they have to make their own judgments,” he told CBS last October.
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And yet, a bombshell email obtained by The New York Post shows that Joe Biden was introduced by his son to a senior Burisma executive in Washington, DC, just 12 months after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” wrote Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyiin an email to Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015.
So, far from having “no involvement” with Burisma, Biden allegedly met with one of the company’s most senior operatives, at his son’s behest, in Washington, in his powerful role as vice-president.
Less than eight months after that meeting with Pozharskyi, then-VP Biden flew to Kyev, in December 2015, and strong-armed the Ukrainian government into firing its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who, lo and behold, was investigating Burisma for corruption at the time.
We know about Biden’s role in ousting Shokin because he boasted about it in a 2018 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he disclosed that he had threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees for Ukraine unless the prosecutor was fired.
“I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
The bombshell email, discovered on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop computer, calls into question Joe Biden’s honesty in every denial he has made about his son’s controversial business dealings in countries where his father wielded power.
It raises questions about why Hunter, with zero experience in energy policy or Ukrainian affairs, but with a history of serious and chronic drug abuse, would have been paid so handsomely by Burisma for the five years he served on its board.
The obvious suspicion is that Hunter was paid these rich sums to buy influence with his father.
And in fact, another email obtained by The Post reinforces the suspicion.
In May 12, 2014, just a few weeks after Hunter joined Burisma’s board, Pozharskyi wrote to him: “We urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message / signal, etc .to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions” against Burisma.
Three months after Joe Biden’s 2015 visit to Kyev, Shokin was forced out of office, in March 2016, and nine months later, all legal proceedings against Burisma were dropped.
The circumstantial evidence that Burisma paid Hunter to influence his father, and, further, that the investment paid off for Burisma, demands answers.
It is open to Joe Biden to demonstrate that there was no conflict of interest in his son’s business dealings.
But it is a joke for him to dismiss reasonable concerns about even the perception of a conflict of interest. It damages America’s international reputation and calls into question his own judgement.
American voters deserve to know.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph