Hunter Biden arranged for a Burisma Holdings big shot to meet with his dad, Vice President Joseph R. Biden, in Washington in April 2015, a year after he joined the corrupt firm’s board of directors and garnered millions of dollars in payments from a Ukraine oligarch, an email shows.
The email, obtained and posted on Wednesday by the New York Post, cast doubt on Democratic presidential candidate Biden’s repeated assertions that he knew nothing of Hunter’s lucrative business ties in Moscow, Ukraine and China.
A second 2014 email from the same Burisma official, Vadym Pozharskyi, asked the newly empaneled Hunter Biden to “use your influence” to stop political and government attacks on the natural gas company.
Vice President Biden bragged in 2018 that he got the state prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, fired though he says it was for corruption, not to help his son.
The 2015 email, if verified, shows that Hunter Biden did in fact leverage his dad’s position as vice president to “cash in,” as two Republican senators charged in a report on his finances earlier this month.
Mr. Pozharskyi ranks high in the energy firm corporate structure under oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky. He is an adviser to the board of directors and has been referred to as the company’s third-highest official.
SEE ALSO: Biden campaign disputes New York Post story
President Barack Obama named Mr. Biden his point man on Ukraine after the Russian invasion of Crimea in February 2014. Three months later, Hunter Biden won a lucrative spot on the Burisma board, alongside his business partner, Devon Archer. Mr. Archer subsequently was convicted on fraud charges.
“Over the course of the next several years, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were paid millions of dollars from a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch for their participation on the board,” the Senate report said.
A year later, Mr. Pozharskyi emailed Hunter Biden at his investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, thanking him for a Washington pow-wow with his dad.
In ungrammatical English, he said. “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together. It’s realty an honor and pleasure. As we spoke yesterday evening, would be great to meet today for a quick coffee. What do you think? I could come to you office somewhere around noon or so, before or on my way to airport. Best, V.”
Former Vice President Biden’s Ukraine diplomacy is highlighted by his bragging afterward that he threatened to withhold billions in loan guarantees from Ukraine unless it fired Mr. Shokin, who at the time happened to be investigating Burisma on bribery charges.
The State Department considers Burisma and Mr. Zlochevsky thoroughly corrupt, according to congressional testimony and documents.
SEE ALSO: Trump campaign: ‘Joe Biden lied to the American people’
How the emails ended up with the New York Post is itself a story that involved President Trump associates, his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and former aide Stephen K. Bannon.
The Post says a computer, a MacBook Pro, was dropped off at a repair shop in Delaware in April 2019.
The shop owner inspected the computer’s hard drive and found numerous sexually explicit images, one of which shows Hunter smoking crack while engaged in sex with an unidentified woman.
The shop owner said he could not identify the man who dropped off the computer as Hunter Biden.
Both the computer and hard drive were seized by a subpoena-armed FBI in December after being notified by the owner.
The owner said he copied the contents and provided them to Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello. Mr. Giuliani has been conducting a controversial investigation into the Bidens and Ukraine on behalf of Mr. Trump.
The Post was tipped off about the computer’s existence by Mr. Bannon. He now stands indicted by a New York grand jury on fraud charges involving contributions to a charity funding sections of a Southern border wall.
The Post also displayed the second 2014 email from Mr. Pozharskyi, this one to Hunter Biden a month after he joined the board. The two had held discussions at Italy’s Lake Como, the email said.
Mr. Biden said in 2018 at the Council on Foreign Relations:
“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 Biden campaign Wednesday pushed back on the Post story, contending that the vice president never attended a meeting described in the email to Mr. Hunter.
“We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” said spokesman Andrew Bates, according to Politico.
The Trump campaign seized the allegation as “explosive,” saying it revealed candidate Biden has been lying.
So far Hunter Biden has not commented.
• Rowan Scarborough can be reached at rscarborough@washingtontimes.com.
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