OPINION:
The day he won a seat on the Burisma Holdings board of directors, an executive urged Hunter Biden to use his influence to intercede in an investigation of the company by Ukrainian authorities.
The request in an email from Vadym Pozharskyi shows why Burisma tapped Hunter as a board member in May 2014: to use his influence as then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son to keep the energy company out of jams. That month, then-President Barack Obama made Mr. Biden his point man for shoring up Ukraine in the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s forcible seizure of Crimea.
The Pozharskyi May 12 email, among thousands of documents in Hunter’s abandoned laptop, has taken on new significance in recent months. House Oversight Committee Republicans disclosed that an informant told the FBI that Burisma executives paid $10 million in bribes to Hunter and to now-President Biden in return for various favors.
The allegation was memorialized by the FBI on a Form 1023, a fact first disclosed to the committee not by the bureau, but by a whistleblower.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has done cartwheels to conceal the document. He agreed to let committee members view a redacted version only after Republicans threatened to hold him in contempt of Congress. Mr. Wray this past week let them see two earlier 1023s that were so heavily redacted as to be were almost useless.
We know that sometime after the May 2014 email, Mr. Biden did in fact do Burisma a great favor. He pressured the government to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the company.
He told the group that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid unless Mr. Shokin 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,’” Mr. Biden boasted. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
Hunter’s seat on the board meant he was on the payroll of Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky, a Russia-aligned oligarch and former government minister whom the State Department considers corrupt.
Laptop documents showed Hunter was being paid $83,333 each month.
The Pozharskyi email to Hunter was both a tutorial on Ukraine’s Byzantine politics and a plea for help.
Mr. Pozharskyi also addressed the message to Devon Archer, a business partner of Hunter’s who had been anointed with a board seat as well.
The New York Post first reported the laptop contents in October 2020, only to be met with derision from the liberal media and with false allegations of a Kremlin plant by Obama intelligence figures who interfered in the election to aid then-candidate Biden.
Mr. Pozharskyi wrote: “The representatives of new authorities in power tend to quite aggressively approach N.Z. [Zlochevsky] unofficially with the aim to obtain cash from him. Initially, it was done by the representatives of Svoboda party and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. These so-called unofficial ‘communications’ would entail blackmailing: in case we don’t cooperate i.e. provide money in cash the gaz production business of N.Z. would be stopped, destroyed etc.”
Mr. Pozharskyi said Burisma refused to pay, which he said sparked a wide-ranging state investigation of the company.
“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 ….” he said.
It is unclear what action Hunter took. The president has said he has never discussed Hunter’s business ventures with his son. But we know that’s not true. (He has also said Hunter never took a dime out of China, and we know he took millions of dollars from communist-connected tycoons.)
Mr. Pozharskyi and Hunter became a team. In April 2015, he sent an email to Hunter thanking him for inviting him to Washington and setting up a meeting with the vice president.
“It’s really an honor and a pleasure,” Mr. Pozharskyi said.
Five days before Burisma announced Hunter’s board appointment, he and Devon Archer planned a strategy on where to park funds and who would get a cut.
Hunter said he and Mr. Archer expected to receive $4.85 million jointly from Burisma. He put the word “pay” in quotes.
“Need to determine what we consider expenses to be deducted from potential Burisma ‘pay’ before we determine true split. … Is 750K reasonable expense # btw Wash and DC office?” Hunter wrote.
He floated the idea of buying a bank through which to send Burisma money.
“We (Burisma) should buy a Lithuanian Bank or an Irish Bank and then apply for a US banking license OR Burisma should lend RSB [Rosemont Seneca Bohai] the capital to purchase a small commercial US Bank. The purpose would be to act as the financing mechanism for expansion plans outside of UKR,” he said.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer alleges that Hunter Biden used a constellation of LLCs, such as Rosemont, to launder money for the Biden family.
The U.S. attorney for Delaware, David C. Weiss, filed a letter in U.S. District Court on June 20 saying that Hunter Biden will plead guilty to two counts of “willful failure” to pay federal taxes on $3 million in income in 2017-18.
“Our job at the House Oversight Committee is to follow the money,” Mr. Comer told Fox News’ Mark Levin.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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