After then-Vice President Joe Biden succeeded in pressuring Ukraine to remove its prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, the next person to hold the job had ties to Hunter Biden.
Yuri Lutsenko, the prosecutor general who took over for Shokin after his ouster in 2016, had relied on the same lobbyists representing Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its chief executive for years, State Department emails suggest. Hunter Biden personally brought those lobbyists into the Burisma deal in 2015 for the purpose of shutting down investigations of Burisma’s chief executive, according to his own emails.
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The connection is newly relevant due to a fresh debate about whether Shokin was actually investigating Burisma at the time Joe Biden pushed to have him removed. That debate was sparked last week by testimony from Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, who said Burisma board members were “fed” a “narrative” in which the Ukrainian prosecutor general did not pose a threat to the company.
In 2015, Hunter Biden arranged for Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano of the lobbying firm Blue Star Strategies to begin working for Burisma and its chief executive, Mykola Zlochevsky.
A Burisma executive said “the ultimate purpose” of the contract with Blue Star Strategies would be “to close down for any cases/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine,” using an alternate spelling of Zlochevsky’s first name.
“I trust Sally and Karen implicitly so I believe we are all aligned,” Hunter Biden replied to the Burisma executive, according to an email found on his abandoned laptop.
Internal State Department emails from 10 months later suggest Painter told the State Department that, at the time, she was also representing Lutsenko.
George Kent, at the time a high-level State Department official focused on Eurasian affairs, complained to other high-level State Department officials that Painter had effectively bullied him in a phone call regarding Lutsenko, the Shokin replacement.
Painter told Kent, according to a September 2016 email, that “she had represented Lutsenko’s interests in the US for five years.” That meant Painter, who Hunter Biden brought in to help shield Burisma from legal scrutiny, was claiming to have been simultaneously representing the prosecutor who replaced Shokin after Shokin was fired.
In the same email, Kent went on to note that Blue Star Strategies, Painter’s company, had offered to connect Lutsenko with Hillary Clinton’s team; at the time, most political operatives believed Clinton was weeks away from winning the presidency.
“Blue Star had promised they could arrange access to high levels of the Clinton campaign,” Kent said Lutsenko had told him.
Blue Star Strategies later came under investigation by the Justice Department for allegations of unregistered foreign lobbying. Painter and Tramontano later registered their work for Zlochevsky under the Foreign Agents Registration Act but not until last year, and despite the firm’s failure to comply with FARA for years, the Department of Justice closed its investigation.
An IRS whistleblower told lawmakers in May that, in 2020, Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf shut down an effort to get a search warrant for Blue Star Strategies’s emails.
Whether Shokin was indeed investigating Burisma and Zlochevsky at the time then-Vice President Joe Biden called for Shokin’s removal has become a flashpoint in the partisan debate over the Biden family’s business.
Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, offered little clarity to the debate.
Archer conceded that Shokin was a “threat” to Burisma and that his removal benefited the company.
“Then he was fired, and then somehow Burisma was let off the hook,” Archer told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week.
But he also said Burisma board members were provided a different version of events.
Archer said during a transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee that the “D.C. team” had suggested to the board that the firing of Shokin would pose problems for Zlochevsky because Shokin was “under control,” which Archer took to mean that the then-prosecutor general had been bribed.
A bribe was paid to a prosecutor general during Archer’s tenure on the Burisma board, and the removal of that prosecutor was indeed bad for Burisma, but it did not appear to be Shokin.
According to the State Department emails, the Obama administration believed Zlochevsky, Burisma’s chief executive, had “almost certainly” paid a bribe to Shokin’s predecessor, Vitaly Yarema, in December 2014 to shut down an investigation.
Archer and Hunter Biden were already on the Burisma board at that point, having joined the board earlier in 2014.
Yarema, the Ukrainian prosecutor general before Shokin, was accused of helping Zlochevsky by taking steps that resulted in the release of assets that a British court had seized from him. Yarema was the Ukrainian prosecutor who, the State Department believed, had received a bribe from Zlochevsky.
Shokin took over for Yarema in February 2015 and began investigating Burisma, evidence suggests, more aggressively.
In February 2016, which was after Joe Biden began calling for Shokin’s removal, Shokin’s office seized assets belonging to Zlochevsky, undermining the claim that Shokin was not investigating Burisma.
Under Lutsenko, the Ukrainian prosecutor who replaced Shokin and who seemingly had ties to Hunter Biden’s business orbit, the investigation into Zlochevsky ended.
Blue Star Strategies did not respond to a request for comment.
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Messages and testimony gathered by the Senate Homeland Security Committee and published in a 2020 report show that Blue Star Strategies succeeded in securing at least one meeting with Lutsenko and a Burisma executive, which, according to other emails, they struggled to do under Shokin.
In other words, the prosecutor who replaced Shokin appeared more amenable to the Burisma lobbying efforts than his predecessor, contradicting Democratic claims that Joe Biden’s calls for Shokin’s firing could not be unethical because Shokin was friendlier to Burisma.
