Newly released emails reveal Ukrainian energy company Burisma expected political favors in return for their relationship with the Biden family, specifically the shutting down of investigations of Burisma by Ukrainian government officials.
Hunter Biden was given a seat on the board at Burisma at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month. Biden has no background or training in the energy sector.
VP Joe Biden famously bragged in 2018 that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees from Ukraine in early 2016 if they didn’t fire their Prosecutor General at the time, Victor Shokin.
Shokin was investigating Burisma and had opened a case against its founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, who among other things, had granted his company permits to drill for oil and gas in Ukraine while he was the Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources.
Democrats and the Left have maintained Shokin was not actively investigating Burisma at the time he was fired, and that there was “international consensus” that Shokin was corrupt and had to go.
But a recently released email found on a laptop once belonging to Hunter Biden, shows Burisma representative Vadym Pozharskyi writing to Hunter Biden and his partner, Devon Archer, and complaining that ‘services’ provided by them weren’t clearly enough defined.
“The scope of work should also include organization of a visit of a number of widely recognized and influential current and/or former US policy-makers to Ukraine in November aiming to conduct meetings with and bring positive signal/message and support on Nikolay’s issue to the Ukrainian top officials above with the ultimate purpose to close down for any cases/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine,” the email reads [emphasis added].
“Nikolay” is Burisma president Mykola (Nikolay) Zlochevsky.
That email was sent in November 2015. It was soon after that that Biden was in Ukraine demanding Shokin be fired.
Recently released audio tapes of then-VP Biden and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which have been made public by a Ukrainian lawmaker, seem to document this quid pro quo.
“I’m a man of my word. And now that the new prosecutor general is in place, we’re ready to move forward in signing that new $1 billion loan guarantee,” Biden can be heard saying.
You can read the email in its entirety here.