(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Recently surfaced audio recordings appeared to reveal that, in 2016, then-Vice President Joe Biden told then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko not to worry about the FBI in order to cover up his family’s corruption, PJ Media reported.
One America News Network and former Fox News media personality Dan Boningo first broke the story.
Initial reporting suggested that the tapes may be leaked versions of the 17 recordings referenced by House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., who last week clashed with the FBI over their refusal to produce—or even acknowledge the existence—of the recordings.
In the recordings, which appeared to have been from a conversation after the historic Nov. 8, 2016 presidential election but before President-elect Donald Trump took office—Biden sought reassurances that the corrupt Poroshenko regime would not cooperate too closely with the incoming president.
He expressed his alarm that if Ukraine were to ask for additional funding to bail out the former Soviet nation, Trump might begin asking questions about what the money was going toward.
“This is getting very, very close to what I don’t want to have happen,” Biden said. “I don’t want Trump to get in the position where he thinks he’s about to buy on to a policy where the financial system is going to collapse and he’s going to be looked to to pour more money into Ukraine.”
When Poroshenko raised concerns that the FBI might investigate, Biden assured him that the intelligence agency would not help Trump uncover any dirt.
“No, no, they are not [working with Trump],” Biden can be heard saying.
“I told you, the FBI concluded he had nothing and they stopped,” he added. “There is no reason to talk to him again.”
The leaked audio comes as House Republicans are investigating whether Biden and his family members accepted bribes from Ukraine’s Burisma energy company to protect it from possible corruption probes.
Trump was impeached in 2019 for calling on Poroshenko’s successor, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to reopen an investigation that Biden had coerced his predecessor to abandon.
Despite the newfound attention on the Biden family’s corrupt quid-pro-quo racket, the recording is not the first evidence to emerge publicly of Biden ordering Poroshenko around to protect his own reputation.
Last summer, for example, audio resurfaced 2016 phone call, Biden warned Poroshenko that cooperating with the incoming Trump administration could threaten Ukrainian economic and “physical security.”
Leaked audio from days after the 2016 election, before Trump’s inauguration—Biden calls Poroshenko, then head of state of Ukraine, and threatens him with assassination if he cooperates with the incoming Trump administration. pic.twitter.com/j3dDzYU3gd
— Rodney Howard-Browne (@rhowardbrowne) July 16, 2022
Biden could be heard on the call instructing Poroshenko to conclude an investigation into the soon-to-be-nationalized Ukrainian bank PrivatBank before the International Monetary Fund made a decision pumping millions of dollars into the country.
“Anything you can do to push the PrivatBank to closure so that the IMF loans comes forward, I would respectfully suggest is critically important to your economic as well as physical security,” Biden told Poroshenko at the time.
The FBI similarly suggested that the reason it was stonewalling the House investigation into the Biden bribery scheme was that it feared for the safety of the whistleblowers involved.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
