FBI files recently declassified and released on Sept. 16 by US Senator Chuck Grassley contain information about the allegedly close ties between the fifth President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko and pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk, who is especially close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Grassley, a conservative Republican and supporter of US President Donald Trump, has long been accused by Democrats of diffusing disinformation planted by Andrei Derkach, a former member of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, who was sanctioned in 2021 and stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship in 2023 for being a Russian propagandist. Derkach had ties with Russia’s FSB dating back to 1993 and today is a member of the Russian Duma.
Although Grassley in 2020 denied receiving any information directly from Derkach, the FBI sources in the report appear to be parroting Derkach’s narratives, which were conveyed to the Trump administration in 2019 via Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Guiliani.
In 2021, the US government accused Derkach of being a “Russian agent” and sanctioned him for interference in the 2020 US presidential elections.
According to FBI sources cited in the documents from 2017 and 2019, whose names have been redacted, their common interest was Ukraine’s gas business, where Burisma Holdings, an energy company linked to Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, has been active over the past decade, according to the New York Post.
One FBI source claimed: “On behalf of Putin, Medvedchuk completely controls Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.”
The documents also contain information about the Biden family’s ties to a possible foreign bribery scheme involving Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma Holdings.
According to the NY Post’s account, Joe Biden met directly with Poroshenko to “protect the interests” of his son and, thus, Zlochevsky. Hunter Biden was paid up to $1 million a year from May 2014 to April 2019 for his work on the Burisma board of directors.
Informants also claimed that Zlochevsky allegedly paid Poroshenko a $100 million bribe in the form of “shares and guaranteed profits from gas sales” to stop “Interpol’s investigation” into Burisma, in which Joe and Hunter Biden “invested money” through a Latvian “front company.”
The future 46th president’s efforts to protect the owner of Burisma were also allegedly enabled by US intelligence officials.
“Two CIA officers took Zlochevsky into the office of Yuriy Lutsenko, who is the Prosecutor General of Ukraine... The CIA officers allegedly said Zlochevsky is protected by the US and urged Lutsenko to stop the investigation on Zlochevsky and let him back into Ukraine,” the same confidential source accusing Poroshenko reported.
“A deal was made, so Zlochevsky could pay $3 million in damages to get back into Ukraine,” the source added.”
The FBI source was interviewed on Feb. 21, 2019, during Trump’s tenure, about two months before Joe Biden declared his candidacy.
Another document, which was prepared based on a June 5, 2017 Skype conversation with an informant “not in a position to testify,” states: “Joseph Biden would ‘take care’ of Burisma Holding issues around the World and Poroshenko would protect Zlochevsky.”
The same source also indicates that Russian foreign intelligence was involved in a “direct operation” to “penetrate the American elite.”
The FBI report notes that the CIA declined to comment on this information, and representatives of the Biden administration and the FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The New York Post also recalls that in July 2023, Grassley (a Republican from Iowa) published another FBI informant file from June 2020, which claimed that Joe and Hunter Biden took $5 million in bribes from Zlochevsky to “protect” Burisma from a corruption investigation launched by Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin.
Later Biden admitted publicly that as vice president he pressured Ukrainian officials to fire Shokin in December 2015, threatening to withhold up to $1 billion in US loan guarantees. The prosecutor general was removed from office a few months later.