Solomon: These once-secret memos cast doubt on Joe Biden's Ukraine story
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Former Vice President Joe Biden , now a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, has locked into a specific story about the controversy in Ukraine.
He insists that, in spring 2016, he strong-armed Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor solely because Biden believed that official 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.
There’s just one problem.
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.
And they raise the troubling prospect that U.S. officials may have painted a false picture in Ukraine that helped ease Burisma’s legal troubles and stop prosecutors’ plans to interview Hunter Biden during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
For instance, Burisma’s American legal representatives met with Ukrainian officials just days after Biden forced the firing of the country’s chief prosecutor and 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.
In addition, Burisma’s American team offered to introduce Ukrainian prosecutors to Obama administration officials to make amends, according to that memo and the American legal team’s internal emails.
The memos raise troubling questions:
1.) If the Ukraine prosecutor’s firing involved only his alleged corruption and ineptitude, why did Burisma's American legal team refer to those allegations as “false information?"
2.) If the firing had nothing to do with the Burisma case, as Biden has adamantly claimed, why would Burisma’s American lawyers contact the replacement prosecutor within hours of the termination and urgently seek a meeting in Ukraine to discuss the case?
Ukrainian prosecutors say they have tried to get this information to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) since the summer of 2018, fearing it might be evidence of possible violations of U.S. ethics laws. First, they hired a former federal prosecutor to bring the information to the U.S. attorney in New York, who, they say, showed no interest. Then, the Ukrainians reached out to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani .
Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, told Trump in July that he plans to launch his own wide-ranging investigation into what happened with the Bidens and Burisma.
“I’m knowledgeable about the situation,” Zelensky told Trump, asking the American president to forward any evidence he might know about. "The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case.”
Biden has faced scrutiny since December 2015, when the New York Times published a story noting that Burisma hired Hunter Biden just weeks after the vice president was asked by President Obama to oversee U.S.-Ukraine relations. That story also alerted Biden’s office that Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin had an active investigation of Burisma and its founder.
Documents I obtained this year detail an effort to change the narrative after the Times story about Hunter Biden, with the help of the Obama State Department.
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.”
I have sued the State Department for any records related to that meeting. The reason is simple: There is both a public interest and an ethics question to knowing if Hunter Biden and his team sought State’s assistance while his father was vice president.
The controversy ignited anew earlier this year when I disclosed that Joe Biden admitted during a 2018 videotaped speech that, as vice president in March 2016, he threatened to cancel $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, to pressure Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko to fire Shokin.
At the time, Shokin’s office was investigating Burisma. Shokin told me 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. Documents seized by the FBI in an unrelated case confirm the payments, which in many months totaled more than $166,000.
Some media outlets have reported that, at the time Joe Biden forced the firing in March 2016, there were no open investigations. Those reports are wrong. A British-based investigation of Burisma's owner was closed down in early 2015 on a technicality when a deadline for documents was not met. But the Ukraine Prosecutor General's office still had two open inquiries in March 2016, according to the official case file provided me. 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 .
After I first reported it in a column , the New York Times and ABC News published similar stories confirming my reporting.
Joe Biden has since responded that he forced Shokin’s firing over concerns about corruption and ineptitude, which he claims were widely shared by Western allies, and that it had nothing to do with the Burisma investigation.
Some of the new documents I obtained call that claim into question.
In a newly sworn affidavit prepared for a European court, Shokin 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 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,” Shokin testified.
“On several occasions President Poroshenko asked me to have a look at the case against Burisma and consider the possibility of winding down the investigative actions in respect of this company but I refused to close this investigation,” Shokin added.
Shokin certainly would have reason to hold a grudge over his firing. But his account is supported by documents from Burisma’s legal team in America, which appeared to be moving into Ukraine with intensity as Biden’s effort to fire Shokin picked up steam.
Burisma’s own accounting records show that it paid tens of thousands of dollars while Hunter Biden served on the board of an American lobbying and public relations firm, Blue Star Strategies, run by Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano , who both served in President Bill Clinton ’s administration.
Ukraine’s Washington embassy confirmed the conversations between Shulyar and Painter but said the reference to a shakeup in Ukrainian government was not specifically referring to Shokin’s firing or anything to do with Burisma.
Painter then asked one of the Ukraine embassy’s workers to open the door for meetings with Ukraine’s prosecutors about the Burisma investigation, the memos show. Eventually, Blue Star would pay that Ukrainian official money for his help with the prosecutor's office.
At the time, Blue Star worked in concert with an American criminal defense lawyer, John Buretta, who was hired by Burisma to help address the case in Ukraine. The case was settled in January 2017 for a few million dollars in fines for alleged tax issues.
Buretta, Painter, Tramontano, Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s campaign have not responded to numerous calls and emails seeking comment.
On March 29, 2016, the day Shokin’s firing was announced, Buretta asked to speak with Yuriy Sevruk, the prosecutor named to temporarily replace Shokin, but was turned down, the memos show.
Sevruk memorialized the meeting in a government memo that the general prosecutor’s office provided to me, stating that the three Americans offered an apology for the “false” narrative that had been provided by U.S. officials about Shokin being corrupt and inept.
“They realized that the information disseminated in the U.S. was incorrect and that they would facilitate my visit to the U.S. for the purpose of delivering the true information to the State Department management,” the memo stated.
The memo also quoted the Americans as saying they knew Shokin pursued an aggressive corruption investigation against Burisma’s owner, only to be thwarted by British allies: “These individuals noted that they had been aware that the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine had implemented all required steps for prosecution … and that he was released by the British court due to the underperformance of the British law enforcement agencies.”
The memo provides a vastly different portrayal of Shokin than Biden's. And its contents are partially backed by subsequent emails from Blue Star and Buretta that confirm the offer to bring Ukrainian authorities to meet the Obama administration in Washington.
For instance, Tramontano wrote the Ukrainian prosecution team on April 16, 2016, saying U.S. Justice Department officials, including top international prosecutor Bruce Swartz, might be willing to meet. “The reforms are not known to the US Justice Department and it would be useful for the Prosecutor General to meet officials in the US and share this information directly,” she wrote.
Buretta sent a similar email to the Ukrainians, writing that “I think you would find it productive to meet with DOJ officials in Washington” and providing contact information for Swartz. “I would be happy to help,” added Buretta, a former senior DOJ official.
Burisma, Buretta and Blue Star continued throughout 2016 to try to resolve the open issues in Ukraine, and memos recount various contacts with the State Department and the U.S. embassy in Kiev seeking help in getting the Burisma case resolved.
Just days before Trump took office, Burisma announced it had resolved all of its legal issues. And Buretta gave an interview in Ukraine about how he helped navigate the issues.
Today, two questions remain.
One is whether it was ethically improper or even illegal for Biden to intervene to fire the prosecutor handling Burisma’s case, given his son’s interests. That is one that requires more investigation and the expertise of lawyers.
The second is whether Biden has given the American people an honest accounting of what happened. The new documents I obtained raise serious doubts about his story’s credibility. And that’s an issue that needs to be resolved by voters.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill.
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"Some media outlets have reported that, at the time Joe Biden forced the firing in March 2016, there were no open investigations. Those reports are wrong. A British-based investigation of Burisma's owner was closed down in early 2015 on a technicality when a deadline for documents was not met. But the Ukraine Prosecutor General's office still had two open inquiries in March 2016, according to the official case file provided me. 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 .
After I first reported it in a column , the New York Times and ABC News published similar stories confirming my reporting."
Yes, John, I do recall that and again, thank you John for all the hard work.
Does anyone else find it strange that the whistle blower requirements were changed shortly before the whistle blower blew his whistle?
Hearsay evidence, or no direct evidence is now allowed. That opens the door to all kinds of left wing mischief.
Kind of thing that makes you go hmmmmm!
I did.
Impeachment is a joke to pacify the lemmings on the left, I'm curious to see what comes out in the long run, the more they look into the sources of the Russian collusion story the more mud Democrats are going to throw at Trump.
Russian collusion? What has that got to do with the Impeachment inquiry? You should empty out your spam folder every now and then so you can keep up with your talking points.
This setup of trying to catch Trump committing a faux pas will not work.
Nothing has. Nothing will. You seem to still believe that there was collusion and obstruction.
It's doubtful that the House will vote to impeach once all the real evidence is in and sorted out.
Maybe you should update yours, All of this is trickle down from the Russian Hoax perpetrated by Democrats.
Mueller believed it, what I believed doesn't matter.
I just heard about this latest spin...
A lot of people on the Left seem extraordinarily tense and nervous about the prospect of merely investigating even the possibility of wrongdoing by Biden. Meanwhile they have been on a fishing expedition for Trump for three years, demanding documents and interrogations because they are just so sure he must be hiding something.
Biden is creepy and shifty and can't be trusted. Any and all allegations and concerns about him should be thoroughly investigated
His fate may already be sealed. The front runner looks more & more like a bitter, pontificating woman in gold rimmed glasses from MA.
This "investigation" of Biden belongs in the same looney bin as the suggestion that Clinton and Obama were going to prison over Benghazi and the allegations that the Clintons have had dozens of people murdered.
Meawhile we have proof of Trump's past immoral and crooked behavior and the Trumpsters hold their tongues like they have been doing for four years.
There is no doubt in my mind that researchers and psychologists will be trying for decades to come to understand why so many people "sold their souls" to follow and protect Donald Trump, probably the biggest asshole to ever exist at the high levels of US government.
Then you won't mind if we just look around a little, eh?
And yet no one ever thought to do anything about it. Funny how none of the experts in law enforcement or even in Congress seemed to think there was "proof" enough to take action.
I think a better question would be why no one had a problem with Trump - other than thinking he was a rich, loudmouth weirdo - for 40 years and then WHAMMO! He becomes president and suddenly you have PROOF that he has ALWAYS been immoral and criminal, and urgent action needs to be taken or our nation and society will be destroyed forever.
Take a step back; TRY to look at it objectively, and tell me which sounds more crazy.
I've always known Trump was an amoral lying narcissistic conman. Sometimes he was amusing and we could ignore him when he was annoying. Not even remotely like watching same corrupt ignorant asshole represent the country and commit crimes in plain sight that are given a pass by most of the gop, who actively go out and lie and deflect for Trump daily. Although after those disastrous performances yesterday on various outlets, that might be changing. Anybody that doesn't have a problem with Trump's actions might need to take a closer look.
A lot of people have a problem with all sorts of things he does. I'm one of them. But I'm not prepared to impeach him over them. Give me a better alternative, and I'll vote for that person. But be warned: simply being "not Trump" or just being better mannered than Trump isn't enough to make that person a better president.
I feel that way about a lot of people who run for president. That's why saying it about Trump doesn't necessarily change anything.
So their big case here is that the timing was suspicious? That's their evidence? And the prosecutor says somebody told him it was because of Burisma? That's the supposed "evidence" behind this accusation? That's just sad. So many Trump supporters downplay and deflect when Trump gets accused of wrongdoing when he is literally admitting to asking a foreign government to look into possible corruption by Biden, but when the evidence is as thin as "well the lawyers for that company called prosecutors shortly after that one prosecutor was fired for corruption" they are ready to string Jow and Hunter up on the nearest tree. The entire seed is nothing but a big "But, but, but what if?...". To imagine some "deep state" conspiracy behind it is truly bat shit crazy.
Don't forget that Lutsenko keeps changing his stories about the Burisma investigations and his meeting with Rudy G.
He said he been trying to give is info to the State Department and DoJ since March of 2018
He reportedly was showing off for the new POTUK but they fired him too in August.
Now Lutsenko is changing his story again, lol.