It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Is it true, as the image suggests, that Hunter Biden was serving as "a director to Ukraine’s largest private gas producer" when the elder Biden "threatened to withhold $1 BILLION in U.S. aid to Ukraine if they didn’t fire a prosecutor looking into" the gas company?
Hunter Biden did hold a directorship for a Ukrainian gas company while his father was vice president. Experts agree that Hunter Biden's acceptance of the position created a conflict of interest for his father.
• Vice President Joe Biden did urge Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, with the threat of withholding U.S. aid. But that was the position of the wider U.S. government, as well as other international institutions.
• We found no evidence to support the idea that Joe Biden advocated with his son's interests in mind, as the message suggests. It's not even clear that the company was actively under investigation or that a change in prosecutors benefited it.
(Hunter) Biden’s Burisma directorship attracted attention because Burisma was owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, a minister under Russia-friendly President Viktor F. Yanukovych who subsequently went into exile after a popular revolution. After Yanukovych was ousted, Zlochevsky faced a variety of corruption-related investigations involving his business.
The Biden campaign told PolitiFact that the vice president learned about his son's role on the board through media reports and never discussed anything related to this company with his son.
I remember going over (to Ukraine), convincing our team … that we should be providing for loan guarantees. … And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from (then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko) and from (then-Prime Minister Arseniy) Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor (Shokin). And they didn’t. ...
"They were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, ... we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, ‘You have no authority. You’re not the president.’ … I said, call him. I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. ... 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. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time."
Steven Pifer is a career foreign service officer who was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton and deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs under President George W. Bush. Pifer told PolitiFact that "virtually everyone" he knew in the U.S. government and virtually all non-governmental experts on Ukraine "felt that Shokin was not doing his job and should be fired. As far as I can recall, they all concurred with the vice president telling Poroshenko that the U.S. government would not extend the $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine until Shokin was removed from office."
In an interview with the Ukrainian website Strana.ua this month, Shokin said the cases were indeed active.
However, Vitaliy Kasko, who had been Shokin’s deputy overseeing international cooperation before resigning in February 2016 citing corruption in the office, produced documents to Bloomberg that under Shokin, the investigation into Burisma had been dormant.
"There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky," Kasko told Bloomberg. "It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015."
But Ukrainian officials tell me there was one crucial piece of information that Biden must have known but didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.
U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.
The general prosecutor’s official file for the Burisma probe — shared with me by senior Ukrainian officials — shows prosecutors identified Hunter Biden, business partner Devon Archer and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money.
Shokin told me in written answers to questions that, before he was fired as general prosecutor, he had made “specific plans” for the investigation that “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”
Although Biden made no mention of his son in his 2018 speech, U.S. and Ukrainian authorities both told me Biden and his office clearly had to know about the general prosecutor's probe of Burisma and his son's role. They noted that:
Hunter Biden's appointment to the board was widely reported in American media;
The U.S. Embassy in Kiev that coordinated Biden's work in the country repeatedly and publicly discussed the general prosecutor's case against Burisma;
Great Britain took very public action against Burisma while Joe Biden was working with that government on Ukraine issues;
Biden's office was quoted, on the record, acknowledging Hunter Biden's role in Burisma in a New York Times article about the general prosecutor's Burisma case that appeared four months before Biden forced the firing of Shokin. The vice president's office suggested in that article that Hunter Biden was a lawyer free to pursue his own private business deals.
Most of the general prosecutor’s investigative work on Burisma focused on three separate cases, and most stopped abruptly once Shokin was fired. The most prominent of the Burisma cases was transferred to a different Ukrainian agency, closely aligned with the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, known as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), according to the case file and current General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko.
NABU closed that case, and a second case involving alleged improper money transfers in London was dropped when Ukrainian officials failed to file the necessary documents by the required deadline. The general prosecutor’s office successfully secured a multimillion-dollar judgment in a tax evasion case, Lutsenko said. He did not say who was the actual defendant in that case.
As a result, the Biden family appeared to have escaped the potential for an embarrassing inquiry overseas in the final days of the Obama administration and during an election in which Democrat Hillary Clinton was running for president in 2016.
But then, as Biden’s 2020 campaign ramped up over the past year, Lutsenko — the Ukrainian prosecutor that Biden once hailed as a “solid” replacement for Shokin — began looking into what happened with the Burisma case that had been shut down.
Lutsenko told me that, while reviewing the Burisma investigative files, he discovered “members of the Board obtained funds as well as another U.S.-based legal entity, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, for consulting services.”
Lutsenko said some of the evidence he knows about in the Burisma case may interest U.S. authorities and he’d like to present that information to new U.S. Attorney General William Barr, particularly the vice president’s intervention.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Biden had correlated and connected this aid with some of the HR (personnel) issues and changes in the prosecutor’s office,” Lutsenko said.
Nazar Kholodnytskyi, the lead anti-corruption prosecutor in Lutsenko’s office, confirmed to me in an interview that part of the Burisma investigation was reopened in 2018, after Joe Biden made his remarks. “We were able to start this case again,” Kholodnytskyi said.
But he said the separate Ukrainian police agency that investigates corruption has dragged its feet in gathering evidence. “We don’t see any result from this case one year after the reopening because of some external influence,” he said, declining to be more specific.
But what makes Lutsenko’s account compelling is that federal authorities in America, in an entirely different case, uncovered financial records showing just how much Hunter Biden’s and Archer’s company received from Burisma while Joe Biden acted as Obama’s point man on Ukraine.
Between April 2014 and October 2015, more than $3 million was paid out of Burisma accounts to an account linked to Biden’s and Archer’s Rosemont Seneca firm, according to the financial records placed in a federal court file in Manhattan in an unrelated case against Archer.
The bank records show that, on most months when Burisma money flowed, two wire transfers of $83,333.33 each were sent to the Rosemont Seneca–connected account on the same day. The same Rosemont Seneca–linked account typically then would pay Hunter Biden one or more payments ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 each. Prosecutors reviewed internal company documents and wanted to interview Hunter Biden and Archer about why they had received such payments, according to interviews.
Lutsenko said Ukrainian company board members legally can pay themselves for work they do if it benefits the company’s bottom line, but prosecutors never got to determine the merits of the payments to Rosemont because of the way the investigation was shut down.
As for Joe Biden’s intervention in getting Lutsenko’s predecessor fired in the midst of the Burisma investigation, Lutsenko suggested that was a matter to discuss with Attorney General Barr: “Of course, I would be happy to have a conversation with him about this issue.”
originally posted by: underwerks
I truly, genuinely hope you're right and this leads to Joe Bidens downfall. I can't think of a bigger win for the left than a controversy that forces Biden to drop out.
He's the only Democrat candidate I don't want to vote for. And I feel confident in saying that goes for most other people on the left as well. I can't think of a more uninspiring, bland candidate.
So here's to hoping Joe gets ran out of town and we can pick between Bernie or Warren.
originally posted by: Grambler
originally posted by: underwerks
I truly, genuinely hope you're right and this leads to Joe Bidens downfall. I can't think of a bigger win for the left than a controversy that forces Biden to drop out.
He's the only Democrat candidate I don't want to vote for. And I feel confident in saying that goes for most other people on the left as well. I can't think of a more uninspiring, bland candidate.
So here's to hoping Joe gets ran out of town and we can pick between Bernie or Warren.
Might have missed the part where this impugnes Obama and the Dems and media as well
originally posted by: underwerks
originally posted by: Grambler
originally posted by: underwerks
I truly, genuinely hope you're right and this leads to Joe Bidens downfall. I can't think of a bigger win for the left than a controversy that forces Biden to drop out.
He's the only Democrat candidate I don't want to vote for. And I feel confident in saying that goes for most other people on the left as well. I can't think of a more uninspiring, bland candidate.
So here's to hoping Joe gets ran out of town and we can pick between Bernie or Warren.
Might have missed the part where this impugnes Obama and the Dems and media as well
I don't care what happens to Obama or anyone in the media in the least. Tar and feather them and run them out of town if they did something wrong. Believe it or not, the party loyalty you right wingers have doesn't extend to everyone else.
Party before all is mostly a right wing thing. I say prosecute and investigate everyone regardless of the letter next to their name. It's only you guys who feel obligated to protect the criminals in your party.
originally posted by: Grambler
originally posted by: underwerks
originally posted by: Grambler
originally posted by: underwerks
I truly, genuinely hope you're right and this leads to Joe Bidens downfall. I can't think of a bigger win for the left than a controversy that forces Biden to drop out.
He's the only Democrat candidate I don't want to vote for. And I feel confident in saying that goes for most other people on the left as well. I can't think of a more uninspiring, bland candidate.
So here's to hoping Joe gets ran out of town and we can pick between Bernie or Warren.
Might have missed the part where this impugnes Obama and the Dems and media as well
I don't care what happens to Obama or anyone in the media in the least. Tar and feather them and run them out of town if they did something wrong. Believe it or not, the party loyalty you right wingers have doesn't extend to everyone else.
Party before all is mostly a right wing thing. I say prosecute and investigate everyone regardless of the letter next to their name. It's only you guys who feel obligated to protect the criminals in your party.
Hahahaha!
Your take in this was you hope it takes down Biden so Warren or Bernie can win
Not “wow look at the corruption of the Dems and the media! I hope they get charged”
Now you lecture me in party loyalty and partisans?
Please
Boty Biden and Warren are aware of this corruption by the way and say nothing
So if this story gets bigger and they continue to defend the Dems of the last admin and Biden, will you still put the country over party and reject them?
originally posted by: Xcalibur254
a reply to: Grambler
Seems like you, and most on this site, forget that Bernie isn't actually a Dem.