Thursday, December 5, 2019

Quoting John Solomon, investigative reporter, on Ukraine and the Bidens

"Hunter Biden’s business partner, Devon Archer, was appointed to Burisma’s board in mid-April 2014 and the firm Rosemont Seneca Bohai — jointly owned by Hunter Biden and Devon Archer — received its first payments from the Ukrainian gas company on April 15, 2014, according to the company’s ledgers. That very same day as the first Burisma payment, Devon Archer met with Joe Biden at the White House, according to White House visitor logs. It is not known what the two discussed."


"A week later, Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine and met with then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. During that meeting, the American vice president urged Ukraine to ramp up energy production to free itself from its Russian natural gas dependence. Biden even boasted that “an American team is currently in the region working with Ukraine and its neighbors to increase Ukraine’s short-term energy supply.” Yatsenyuk welcomed the help from American “investors” in modernizing natural gas supply lines in Ukraine."


"Less than three weeks later, Burisma added Hunter Biden to its board to join Archer. To some, the sequence of events creates the appearance that Joe Biden’s pressure to increase Ukrainian gas supply and to urge Kiev to rely on Americans might have led Burisma to hire his son. More investigation needs to be done to determine exactly what happened."


" ... the media significantly understates what Burisma was paying Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Bohai firm for his and Devon Archer’s services. Bank records obtained by the FBI in an unrelated case show that between May 2014 and the end of 2015, Hunter Biden’s and Archer’s firm received monthly consulting payments totaling $166,666, or three times the amount cited by the media."


"As for the investigation of the Bidens and their payoffs for blocking Ukraine’s investigation of the corruption in Burisma, the Ukrainian company that hired the protection of Biden, Trump doesn’t need to ask for it in exchange for $1 billion. Ukrainian officials have released the records.


"Burisma holdings paid Hunter Biden $3,166,000 for protection according to the records released by Ukraine. More importantly, the information released by Ukraine, according to the report, revealed that Burisma pressured the corrupt Obama State Department to intervene to end the Ukrainian investigation of Burisma for corruption. This is precisely what the Obama regime did. Joe Biden forced the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor by giving the President of Ukraine 6 hours to fire the prosecutor, thus ending the investigation, or forfeiting $1 billion."


(Ukraine prosecutor) "Shokin told me, ABC News and others that he was fired because Joe Biden was unhappy that the Burisma investigation was not shut down. He made similar statements in an affidavit prepared to be filed in an European court."


"In fact, Shokin told me in an interview he was making plans to interview Burisma board members, including Hunter Biden, at the time he was fired. And it was publicly reported that in February 2016, a month before Shokin was fired, that Ukrainian prosecutors raided one of Zlochevsky’s homes and seized expensive items like a luxury car as part of the corruption probe."



"In the end, though, whether Joe Biden had good or bad intentions in getting (prosecutor) Shokin fired is somewhat irrelevant to the question of the vice president’s ethical obligation. U.S. ethics rules require all government officials to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest in taking official actions. Ethics experts I talked with say Biden should have recused himself from the Shokin matter once he learned about the Burisma investigation to avoid the appearance issue."