(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) George Kent, a former embassy official in Ukraine, admitted in a 2016 email that Hunter Biden‘s crooked financial transactions with companies like Burisma “undercut” America’s efforts to fight corruption in the nation, Just the News reported.
“The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter’s presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine,” Kent told top-ranking State Department officials in the email.
Kent testified against former President Donald Trump in the House’s impeachment investigation. The House’s inquiry sprung from a conversation in which Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens for corruption.
Despite Kent’s firsthand knowledge that Hunter had corrupt dealings in Ukraine, he blamed Trump for daring to demand an investigation into the Bidens’ dealings.
Kent also knew that Burisma officials paid a $7 million “bribe” to get the investigation into the company dropped. Hunter, who made $3 million from Burisma, sat on the board when the officials paid the bribe.
“Ukrainians heard one message from us,” Kent wrote, “and then saw another set of behavior, with the [Biden] family [associating] with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules in the oil/gas sector.”
Former Ambassador to Kiev Marie Yovanovitch, who Trump fired after she testified against him in the impeachment hearing, had Kent’s email marked “classified” and did not mention it during the inquiry.
Yovanovitch withheld key evidence that justified Trump’s request for an investigation into the Biden family, yet she likely will not face prosecution.
The State Department further ignored the email’s existence when Just the News filed several Freedom of Information Act lawsuits that sought information about Joe and Hunter’s Ukraine dealings.
The State Deparment’s failure to produce the email violated federal law.
A previously released State Department memo also showed that American diplomats warned Biden that Burisma was corrupt in 2015.
