Two U.S. senators have released an interim report on the son of former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and his work for Ukrainian private energy company Burisma Holdings.
The investigation, published on Sept. 23 by Republicans Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, was supposed to be a bombshell, according to the Republicans. Instead, it largely recirculates information that was already public and mounts an aggressive defense of the very Republicans attempting to accuse Biden, the Democrats’ candidate for president, of a conflict of interest in Ukraine in the runup to the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
At its strongest, the report reiterates that Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma — a company whose Ukrainian owner was investigated for money laundering — while his father was the U.S. point person on Ukraine looked bad and made U.S. diplomats feel “awkward.”
“Unfortunately, U.S. officials had no other choice but to endure the ‘awkward(ness)’ of continuing to push an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine while the vice president’s son sat on the board of a Ukrainian company with a corrupt owner,” the report reads.
At the same time, the authors of the report admit that they have no proof of the key Republican allegation against Biden: that he used his position to protect Burisma — and, by extension, his son — from a corruption investigation. That narrative has been widely debunked by media outlets, including the Kyiv Post.
“The extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected U.S. policy toward Ukraine is not clear,” the report concludes.
Tilling the same soil
Between 2014 and 2019, Hunter Biden served on the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, a company owned by former Ukrainian Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky.
At the time, the younger Biden’s appointment to the board raised eyebrows among Ukraine watchers: Zlochevsky was a former ally of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014, just two months before Biden joined the board.
Moreover, Biden joined Burisma in April 2014, the same month when the British Serious Fraud Office opened a probe into Zlochevsky, as part of a wider effort to recover assets stolen by Yanukovych and his cronies.
The investigation, however, died out due to lack of cooperation from the Ukrainian prosecutors. Ukrainian civil society leaders later claimed that other investigations into Zlochevsky for tax evasion, fraud and corruption allegedly committed during his tenure in the government and before Hunter Biden came to Burisma had been sabotaged by three Ukrainian prosecutors general.
With time, Hunter Biden’s role in Burisma would come to play a central role in a series of unfounded accusations against the former vice president pushed by Ukrainian politicians, right-wing media and, most prominently, U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
Read more: Trump, Giuliani drag Ukraine into conspiracy theories
Giuliani would allege that the elder Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, in order to derail an investigation into Burisma.
That was mostly untrue. Biden indeed called for Shokin’s ouster, but he was articulating official U.S. government policy and echoing the long-standing demands of Ukrainian civil society, who saw Shokin as an official who hampered corruption investigations.
Moreover, Shokin appeared to have sabotaged the Prosecutor General’s Office investigation into Burisma. And there was never an investigation into Hunter Biden personally.
Read more about Burisma, its owner Zlochevsky, and criminal cases against him
Read more about Shokin and why he was so unpopular in Kent’s words
The conspiracy theories peddled by Giuliani and others would eventually play a key role in Trump’s impeachment in December 2019 – February 2020, where numerous officials would testify. Among them would be State Department official George Kent, whose testimony Johnson and Grassley cite as critical evidence in their report.
Recycled report
At the core of the Senate Republican report are two State Department officials who raised concerns that Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma gave the impression of a conflict of interest.
In 2015, Kent, then acting deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, expressed that apprehension to Vice President Biden’s office. Those concerns went unanswered, according to the report. Kent also later raised the issue in emails with his U.S. government colleagues.
According to Kent, U.S. officials believed that Zlochevsky was involved in money laundering. During a call with the national security staff in the vice president’s office, Kent said he felt that that Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma “creates the perception of a potential conflict of interest, given Vice President Biden’s role and his very strong advocacy for anticorruption action,” he testified.
“I thought that someone needed to talk to Hunter Biden, and he should (step) down from the board of Burisma,” he said.
In emails with colleagues, Kent also wrote:
“[W]ould we want an article on the front page of the Washington Post (and in this case, the Kyiv Post, and on the FB pages of [at the time, reformist lawmakers] Sergiy Leshchenko and Mustafa Nayyem) commenting about this public private partnership with Burisma, the link to Hunter Biden, and the link to Zlochevsky, who almost certainly paid off the [Prosecutor General’s Office] in December 2014 (I had the then First deputy PG Danylenko tell me the bribe was $7 million) to have the case against him closed and his $23 million in assets frozen in the UK unfrozen?”
The report also notes that Amos Hochstein, the former U.S. special envoy for international energy affairs, at least twice raised this issue with Joe Biden personally.
According to Hochstein’s testimony, he had grown concerned about “an increase in chatter on media outlets close to Russians and corrupt oligarch-owned media outlets” that used Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma to undermine his father’s anti-corruption message in Ukraine.
Later, Hochstein also discussed the issue with Hunter Biden. However, he did not recommend Biden step down from the Burisma board because he did not “believe that was my place to have that discussion, one way or the other,” according to the report.
Taken together, Kent and Hochstein’s concerns represent the most salient claims in Johnson and Grassley’s report: that Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma made it more difficult for the U.S. government to advocate for anti-corruption in Ukraine and appeared to suggest a conflict of interest.
Other allegations
Johnson and Grassley’s report also examines Hunter Biden’s business dealings and travels with his father. Most of the report’s claims do not point to clear wrongdoing, but rather gather circumstantial evidence to make insinuations.
The report notes that:
- Hunter Biden received Secret Service protection from 2009 to 2014 during numerous trips to destinations around the world. The younger Biden’s protectee status ended shortly after Time magazine published an article reporting on Burisma’s increased lobbying efforts in the U.S. The report does not prove a connection between those two events.
- Then-Secretary of State John Kerry lied when he claimed not to know about Biden’s role on the Burisma board during a public appearance in 2019.
- Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer, who also served on Burisma’s board, received $4 million for their work at Burisma. Additionally, Biden, Archer and Biden’s family members “received millions of dollars from foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds.”
- Archer received over $140,000 from a businessman with connections to the government of Kazakhstan.
- Hunter Biden had business connections to Chinese nationals linked to the government of China, and some of these Chinese business people faced criminal probes. “Those associations resulted in millions of dollars in cash flow,” the report states.
- Russian businesswoman Elena Baturina, wife for the late former Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, wired $3.5 million to Hunter Biden and Archer’s company bank account for a “consultancy agreement.”
Vaguely, the report also claims that: “Hunter Biden paid nonresident women who were nationals of Russia or other Eastern European countries and who appear to be linked to an ‘Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring.’”
Although the report at times notes what Joe Biden was doing as vice president when these events took place, it provides no evidence that he was involved.
On the defensive
Johnson and Grassley also offer a full-throated defense of the Republicans from allegations that they are laundering Russian disinformation in their attempts to influence the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Instead, they accuse Democrats of spreading conspiracy theories to discredit the report before its eventual publication.
“Democrats… relied upon materials and statements from foreign nationals who are attempting to influence U.S. politics to levy unsupported and demonstrably inaccurate allegations linking the (Senate Republican) majority’s investigation to those same unreliable foreign nationals,” the report states.
“As part of their efforts, Democrats laundered their unclassified speculation through classified analysis of intelligence reporting to fabricate a veneer of credibility in an effort to shield their claims from public scrutiny.”
In particular, they accuse the Democrats of collaborating with Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker who has pushed conspiracy theories about Joe Biden for months.
The U.S. Intelligence Community has accused Derkach of acting in the interests of Russia and attempting to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. On Sept. 10, the U.S. Treasury added Derkach to its sanctions list, referring to him as “an active Russian agent.”
Read more about Andriy Derkach, his meeting with Giuliani in Kyiv and the recordings he released
In this manner, the report pushes back against allegations by Congressional Democrats that Russian-sourced information was being funneled to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Johnson chairs.
The report also comes to the defense of Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat who has been a central source of accusations about Biden.
Johnson and Grassley argue that Telizhenko — “the Democrats’ personification of Russian disinformation,” according to the report — also had extensive contacts with Democrats. Both pro-Trump media and the report have proved this. However, that is unsurprising because Telizhenko previously worked for the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, D.C. and other Ukrainian government agencies.
Read more about Andrii Telizhenko, Giuliani’s favorite Ukrainian “whistleblower”
They also stress that Telizhenko worked as a contractor for Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat-aligned lobbying firm, in 2016-2017 and had been in communication with its employees as late as mid-2019.
The report dedicates 18 of its 87 pages to defending Telizhenko from Democratic allegations that he is spreading Russian disinformation.
It excerpts heavily from his emails with U.S. officials and tallies his meetings with them. One of the officials whose communication with Telizhenko the report cites extensively is Elisabeth Zentos, a former member of President Barack Obama’s National Security Council.
Earlier, John Solomon, a pro-Trump journalist who has helped advance allegations of corruption against Biden, published other excerpts from Telizhenko’s emails with Zentos to argue that Democrats were in close contact with the Ukrainian.
To this end, the Johnson and Grassley’s report appears to represent the intersection of a pro-Trump media narrative with an official Senate investigation.
