US President Donald Trump’s spy chief John Ratcliffe published a heavily redacted 2015 intelligence report on Tuesday – resurrecting a decade-long scandal regarding former US President Joe Biden’s son’s association with defunct Ukrainian gas giant Burisma Holdings.
Ratcliffe, Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), said on X that declassifying the document was “in the public interest.”
The document, much of which has been blacked out, relates to a visit by then-US Vice President Joe Biden to Kyiv in early December 2015.
According to the document, Ukrainian officials within the administration of then-President Petro Poroshenko “expressed bewilderment and disappointment” after Biden’s visit.
The document claims that these officials had expected Biden to “advocate in support of or against specific officials within the Ukrainian Government” during his visit.
Instead, in their opinion, Biden had come to Kyiv “almost exclusively to give a generic public speech” and had no intention of discussing “substantive matters.”
The document further claims that these unnamed Ukrainian officials “privately mused” at the US media scrutiny of Biden’s son Hunter after claims emerged that he had ties to corruption in Ukraine, taking them “as evidence of a double-standard within the United States Government towards matters of corruption and political power.”
Ratcliffe also published what is presented as a contemporaneous email from an unnamed source alleging that Biden “would strongly prefer” the report not be disseminated.
On 15 Dec., 2015, The New York Times reported that the younger Biden’s association with Ukraine’s Burisma energy company had the potential to undermine his father’s anti-corruption agenda in US-Ukraine relations.
Then one of Ukraine’s biggest gas and oil companies, Burisma was owned by disgraced former politician Mykola Zlochevsky, who had embezzled millions of dollars in public money from the company.
When the elder Biden faced Trump in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, the allegations against his son resurfaced. In the autumn of 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open corruption probes into the Bidens after they were discussed in a phone call between the two leaders.
Both Zelensky and Trump denied that Trump had exerted undue pressure, even though Trump had frozen more than $391 million in aid to Ukraine in the days before the phone call, as per The New York Times.
Last year, a former FBI informant was indicted for falsely claiming in June 2020 that the two Bidens had accepted more than $5 million in bribes from Burisma.
In June 2024, Hunter Biden was convicted of using drugs while in possession of a firearm. A few months later, he pleaded guilty to several tax offences.
However – in one of his final acts as US president – Joe Biden granted his son an unconditional pardon, claiming that his prosecution was politically motivated.
Tuesday’s declassification of the redacted document comes as Trump faces increasing pressure to release the “Epstein Files,” a rumoured list of wealthy and powerful men associated with deceased American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.