UPDATE VIA FOX NEWS: Fox News reported this afternoon that “the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is investigating newly released emails that reveal that Hunter Biden introduced his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings in 2015 at Hunter’s request.”
The cable news network also published an official response from the Biden campaign about the allegations, from spokesman Andrew Bates:
Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.
The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story. They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani — whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported — claimed to have such materials.
Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: A smoking gun implicating Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden in the Hunter Biden—Burisma scandal on Wednesday offered hope that the corrupt dealings could produce some measure of legal or political accountability.
The New York Post reported that it had obtained a trove of emails from Hunter’s old laptop, including one that directly disproved Joe Biden’s claim that he never discussed foreign business deals with his son.
On April 17, 2015, a year after Hunter joined the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi wrote to thank Hunter for providing access to his father—then the vice president—during a trip to Washington, DC.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together,” Pozharskyi wrote in the email. “It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”
The email surfaced as part of a massive data cache recovered from a water-damaged MacBook Pro, which Hunter reportedly dropped off at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019 but never recovered or paid for, according to the business owner.
Also included among the shocking contents was a raunchy, 12-minute video that showed Hunter smoking crack and engaging in sex acts with an unidentified woman, as well as other sexually explicit images, Fox News reported.
Although the store owner could not positively identify Hunter, the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named in honor of Hunter’s late brother.
The whistleblower alerted the FBI after the Burisma scandal broke, and they seized the laptop in December 2019, but not before he copied the hard drive.
He reportedly provided the copy it to Robert Costello, a lawyer for Rudy Giuliani, who was offering legal counsel to President Donald Trump and investigating the Burisma scandal.
In the wake of the bombshell, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which recently released a damning report on the Biden family’s foreign business dealings, said it was following up on the discoveries after the repairman approached them last month.
“Although we consider those communications to be confidential, because the individual in this instance spoke with the media about his contact with the committee, we can confirm receipt of his email complaint,” a spokesperson for committee chair Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., told the Post. “We have been in contact with the whistleblower and are in the process of attempting to validate the information he provided.”
Some of the emails used Hunter’s official first name, Robert, and other code words that seem intended to obscure the shady subject matter.
Among those was one in which Hunter appeared to leverage his connection with the White House to boost his pay at Burisma.
While some accounts differ, his “consulting” fees during his five-year stint with Burisma are reported to have been close to a million dollars a year.
Hunter resigned the position in April 2019 after it was revealed that Giuliani was investigating—and the same month that Joe Biden announced his candidacy for president.
Shortly before joining Burisma’s board, in an April 13, 2014 email to his longtime business partner Devon Archer—who was already on the board—Hunter made multiple references to his father as “my guy” while discussing an anticipated visit to Ukraine.
“The contract should begin now—not after the upcoming visit of my guy,” he wrote.
“That should include a retainer in the range of 25k p/m w/ additional fees where appropriate for more in depth work,” he added. “… Complete separate from our respective deals re board participation.”
The new revelation also comes a week after reports that Archer—himself a former top aide to Obama Secretary of State John Kerry—faced a reinstated conviction over a fraud charge in a separate scheme to bilk a Native American tribe out of proceeds from a $60 million bond sale.
Most importantly, though, Hunter’s laptop could potentially implicate his father in precisely the sort of quid pro quo dealings during the Obama administration that House Democrats sought to impeach President Donald Trump for—ironically as he called on the Ukrainian president to investigate the Biden–Burisma scandal.
Roughly a year after his DC meeting with Pozharskyi, Joe Biden—the top official overseeing the US State Department’s so-called anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine following a 2014 color revolution—forced the firing of the country’s top prosecutor, who had recently reopened a corruption probe into Burisma.
As a newly disclosed memo revealed last month, the energy company had bribed prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin‘s predecessor into allowing the probe to go dormant shortly after Hunter joined the Burisma board.
But when Shokin conducted a series of raids on Burisma properties in the spring of 2016, the company ramped up its lobbying efforts to the US State Department.
Shortly thereafter, Biden delivered an ultimatum to then-President Petro Poroshenko: fire Shokin or lose a billion-dollar US bond guarantee.
Biden bragged during a 2017 panel discussion about his coercive strong-arming of the former Soviet satellite.
“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recounted in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
But as recently as the presidential debate last month, he claimed—without evidence—that the accusations surrounding the Burisma scandal had been “discredited.”
The left-wing media has largely been complicit in Biden’s attempts to cover up the scandal and stonewall the public.
On the handful of occasions when he was asked about the Burisma dealings, Biden has become belligerent with reporters.
After “Today” show co-host Savannah Guthrie pressed him on it in February, Biden reiterated his false claim that there was ‘no evidence’ of wrongdoing.
“It’s a good thing that no one’s found anything wrong with his dealing with Ukraine except they say it sets a bad image,” Biden insisted.
“…You’re saying things you do not know what you’re talking about,” he continued, when asked whether it was wrong for Hunter to leverage his connections to obtain the board seat. “No one has said that—who said that?”
