‘Whatever Biden had to say in Kyiv, he knew he did not want it overheard by the many bureaucratic busybodies…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The dual scandals involving Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden‘s corrupt family business affairs and the deep-state plot to smear President Donald Trump with claims of Russian collusion have cast new scrutiny over a trip the former vice president took to Ukraine in the final days of the Obama administration.
Biden made the unorthodox visit to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Jan. 17, 2017—a mere three days before Trump’s inauguration.
The looming question is why.
Officially, Biden undertook the last-minute jaunt to encourage further democratic reforms in the corruption-laden ex-Soviet satellite.
But that seems highly unlikely under the circumstances, wrote Joseph Duggan for the conservative website American Greatness.
“The cover story was that Biden was in Kyiv to give a speech exhorting Ukrainians to repent and renounce their centuries-old habit of public corruption,” Duggan wrote.
“Think about it: A man who in three days would have no power gave a public speech demanding that his corrupt hosts—people who only fear overwhelming power—give up their addiction to corruption,” he continued. “Preposterous.”
Duggan also wondered why such a message could not have been conveyed in a phone call.
“Whatever Biden had to say in Kyiv, he knew he did not want it overheard by the many bureaucratic busybodies … who manage to listen in or receive transcripts of these highly sensitive communications,” he wrote.
“Only by getting face to face in Kyiv with his Ukrainian contacts could Biden be certain of his ability to conduct such communications with them without anyone else, in our government or theirs, knowing about it,” Duggan speculated.
The recent impeachment proceedings—resulting from a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy—offered telling insight into the circumstances of Biden’s Ukraine involvement, but they raised more questions than they answered.
Trump solicited Zelenskiy’s help in investigating both Biden’s personal corruption and the rumors of a hacked Democrat server that was linked to the Russia-gate conspiracy.
Most of the focus was placed on Biden’s intervention in an anti-corruption investigation of Burisma, the energy company where his son Hunter was receiving a million-dollar-a-year stipend for “consulting.”
Duggan guessed that, in all likelihood, Biden’s last official state trip as vice president was meant to feather his nest further after leaving office, or possibly to ensure that his previous quid-pro-quo arrangement would not expire.
“He was creating an opportunity for himself to speak, unmonitored, with the bosses of a corrupt country whose natural gas company was paying his miscreant son,” Duggan wrote.
But other, even more sinister, possibilities exist.
The trip coincided with some of the most crucial days in the FBI conspiracy to link Trump with claims of Russian collusion.
If, in fact, the Democratic National Committee‘s server, after being “examined” forensically by CrowdStrike, made its way to Ukraine, the Obama administration’s point-man with the Petro Poroshenko administration might have needed to make some emergency cover-up plans.
Although Biden has denied knowledge of the FBI abuses, evidence suggests that Obama himself may have signed off in the efforts to frame top Trump advisers.
Moreover, the classified nature of many of the impeachment proceedings—ostensibly to protect whistleblowers—raises the possibility that the U.S. intelligence community may have been more deeply involved in Ukrainian nation-building than has been officially acknowledged.
Leading up to its 2014 revolution, the country had, for decades, been the staging ground of a proxy war—likely involving covert intelligence operations—for geopolitical and economic influence between Western and Soviet powers.
Thus, the purpose of the secrecy in Biden’s visit may have been to cover-up something else entirely unrelated to either Burisma or the 2016 election.
“The truth is that we will never know the identities of every person with whom Biden spoke when he was in Kyiv in January 2017,” wrote Duggan.
“No one apart from the direct interlocutors—not even the Vindman twins—will ever know everything that Biden and his Ukrainian friends had to say to one another 72 hours before the Trump inauguration,” he said.
But whatever the motives behind his trip, there can be little doubt that serving and representing the broader interests of the American people to provide for a stable transition of power was low on Biden’s list of priorities.
“The closer to inauguration day, the more important it becomes to handle sensitive details diligently,” Duggan noted. “This was a duty that Joe Biden decided was subordinate to his desire to travel abroad.”