House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) is requesting information from the State Department related to then-Vice President Joe Biden’s actions and decision-making surrounding Ukraine, including threatening to withhold aid to the country unless it fired its prosecutor general.
In a letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Comer is requesting information about a call Hunter Biden made to “D.C.” at the behest of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company where he was a board member, days before his father threatened the aid to the country.
OVERSIGHT RANKING MEMBER RASKIN SAYS GOP’S BIDEN INVESTIGATION IS A ‘TOTAL BUST’
In a December 2015 trip to Ukraine, then-Vice President Joe Biden was set to unveil an extra $1 billion in loan guarantees to help Ukraine’s economy rebuild, but he changed his mind en route to Kyiv. Instead, on Dec. 8, 2015, he gave a speech about how corrupt Viktor Shokin, the country’s prosecutor general, was.
During this visit, Biden also threatened the Ukrainian government that the United States would withhold the loan guarantees if Ukraine did not fire Shokin, whom many in the West criticized for not doing enough to crack down on corruption. The U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and other allies had the same objective.
Days before Biden’s trip to Ukraine, officials at Burisma — the Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden was a board member — asked the president’s son to call “D.C.” and get help with a number of outside issues, including pressure from the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, according to testimony from former Hunter Biden business associate Devon Archer.
“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 said at an event in 2018. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
Shokin was fired in 2016.
“The timing of these events is notable to the Committee,” Comer said in the letter. “During the Committee’s transcribed interview with Devon Archer—a longtime Biden family associate—Archer explained that by late 2015, Vadym Pozharsky, Burisma’s corporate secretary, was increasingly pushing Hunter Biden to deliver help from the U.S. government regarding pressure Zlochevsky was facing from the Office of the Prosecutor General and abroad. … The Committee is investigating the nature of this call and the circumstances that surrounded it, including at the State Department.”
In part, Comer is requesting that the State Department give the committee all documents and communications made in the course of phone calls between then-Vice President Joe Biden and Ukrainian officials from January 1, 2014, to December 31, 2016, and all internal documents and communications relating to any conditions placed on the $1 billion loan guarantee.
Whether or not Shokin was investigating Burisma has been up for debate.
Democrats have pointed to a portion of Archer’s testimony where he said it was relayed to him by the “D.C. team” that Burisma believed “Shokin was under control” and they did not want him gone. However, Archer also testified that he had “no way to verify that.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
But, in an interview with Tucker Carlson on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Archer changed his tune and said that Shokin was a threat to Burisma.
“He was a threat,” Archer told Carlson. “He ended up seizing assets of [Burisma owner] Nikolai [Zlochevsky] — a house, some cars, a couple properties. And Nikolai actually never went back to Ukraine after Shokin seized all of his assets.”
