The mainstream media reporters are still missing the real story—bribery likely took place during Joe and Hunter Biden’s involvement with Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer is joined by Seamus Bruner on the latest Drill Down podcast, and together they lay out the case, based on their research, that bribery clearly took place: The Biden family was paid in exchange for explicit favors done by then Vice President Joe Biden for a foreign entity.
“This is a clear violation of the law. This is criminal conduct that’s occurring. This is a direct bribe. It’s a quid pro quo,” Schweizer says. “The bottom line is, it doesn’t matter if you ever demonstrate that a single penny went to Joe Biden, because bribery can mean paying off your family. If a politician’s family gets paid and the politician performs a service for that, it’s a bribe in the same way. So, to me, this is now a clear-cut case.”
That assertion comes after Seamus Bruner found yet more evidence on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Bruner, Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute, has been on the Hunter Biden story since 2017 and “may have spent more time on the Hunter Biden laptop computer than Hunter Biden has,” Schweizer quips.
Bruner just unearthed evidence that further establishes the direct connection between Hunter Biden’s being named to the board of directors of Burisma and his father the Vice President threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to the Ukrainian government unless it fired the prosecutor who was then investigating Burisma for corruption.
That prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was indeed fired right before Biden handed over the aid money to Ukraine, as Biden himself bragged about doing at a 2018 foreign policy conference.
This allegation, which amounts to a direct quid pro quo between Joe Biden and the executives of Burisma, has been made before. But the emails found by Bruner establish a direct timeline connection between Burisma pressuring Hunter Biden to earn his $1 million dollar salary to get his father to force the Ukrainian government to call off the investigation of the company’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky.
In 2014, a revolution in Ukraine deposed its Moscow-serving president Yanukovich. That same year, then President Barack Obama made Joe Biden his “point man” on U.S.-Ukraine policy. At about that time, Biden’s son Hunter gets his deal with Burisma. The company’s founder, Zlochevsky, has been under international investigation and his assets have even been frozen in London.
But an email uncovered by Bruner on Hunter Biden’s laptop now makes it clear that by November 2015, Burisma executives were not happy with Hunter’s work. Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi wrote to Hunter Biden, “…the suggested scope of work is largely lacking concrete tangible results that we set out to achieve in the first place.”
Burisma wanted one key “deliverable,” according to the email. They wanted the pressure to be taken off their company and their founder’s frozen assets released.
Vadim Pozharskyi closed the email by stating in no uncertain terms that the “ultimate purpose” was to “close down any cases pursuits against Zlochevsky in Ukraine.”
The message got through., The next month — December 2015 — Hunter Biden, along with business associate and fellow Burisma board member Devon Archer, met with Burisma in Kyiv. As Archer testified this month, Hunter, Zlochevsky, and Pozharskyi “stepped away for a bit” and “called Washington,” when they made their case to Joe Biden that Shokin needed to be fired.
Three months later, Vice President Joe Biden went to Kyiv and demanded the government agree to fire Shokin as a precondition of receiving $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. Shokin was fired in April 2016 and the case was closed by the prosecutor who replaced him, Yuriy Lutsenko. In 2018, Joe Biden famously boasted on camera about having done so.
“He did what his son’s benefactors told him to do,” said Schweizer. “We even have independent confirmation of this, from a State Department official named George Kent who dealt with Ukraine. Kent told the Senate Oversight committee that in Dec 2015, he was advised by Biden’s staff to avoid mentioning Zlochevsky, and instead recommended to say, “I’m not going to get into naming names or accusing individuals.”
Revelations over the weekend about the collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal, in Politico and the New York Times, are not the main story here. The main story remains that Joe Biden and his staff knew of Hunter’s relationship with Burisma and offered official help to them.
To hear more of the Drill Down podcast – click here.
