After the then vice president Joe Biden managed to press Ukraine dismiss its attorney general Victor Shokinthe next person to take the job had connections Hunter Biden.
Yuri Lutsenko, the attorney general who took over from Shokin after he was ousted in 2016, had for years relied on the same lobbyists representing Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its chief executive. Department of State suggest emails. Hunter Biden personally led these lobbyists to the Burisma deal in 2015 for al purpose to close the investigations of Burisma’s CEO, according to his own emails.
HOW THE DEBATES CAN MAKE OR BREAK THE CANDIDATES
The connection is newly relevant because of renewed debate over whether Shokin was actually investigating Burisma at the time Joe Biden pushed to remove him. That debate was sparked last week by testimony from Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer, who said Burisma’s board members were “fed” a “narrative” that the Ukrainian attorney general did not represent 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 executive director, Mykola Zlochevsky.
A Burisma executive said the “ultimate goal” of the contract with Blue Star Strategies would be to “close any case or prosecution against Nikolay in Ukraine,” using an alternate spelling of Zlochevsky’s first name.
“I implicitly trust Sally and Karen, so I think we’re all aligned,” Hunter Biden replied to the Burisma executive, according to a e-mail found on his abandoned laptop.
Internal State Department emails from 10 months later suggest that Painter told the State Department that, at the time, he was also representing Lutsenko.
George Kent, at the time a senior State Department official focused on Eurasian affairs, complained to other senior State Department officials that Painter had effectively harassed him on a phone call phone call about Lutsenko, Shokin’s replacement.
Painter told Kent, according to a September 2016 e-mail, who “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, claimed to have simultaneously been 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 firm, had offered to connect Lutsenko with Hillary Clinton’s team; at the time, most political operatives believed that Clinton was weeks away from winning the presidency.
“Blue Star had promised that they could arrange access to high levels of the Clinton campaign,” Kent said Lutsenko had told him.
Blue Star Strategies was later investigated by the Department of Justice over allegations of unregistered foreign lobbying. Pintor and Tramontano later recorded his work for Zlochevsky under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, but not until last year, and despite the company’s years of FARA noncompliance, did the Justice Department close its investigation.
An IRS whistleblower he said lawmakers in May that, in 2020, Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf shut down an effort to obtain a search warrant for Blue Star Strategies’ emails.
While Shokin was investigating Burisma and Zlochevsky at the time, then-Vice President Joe Biden’s call for Shokin’s removal has become a flashpoint in the partisan debate over the Biden family business.
Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden, offered little clarity on the debate.
Archer admitted that Shokin was a “threat” to Burisma and that his removal benefited the company.
“Then he was fired, and Burisma kind of let himself go,” Archer told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week.
But he also said Burisma board members were given a different version of events.
Archer said during a transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee that the “DC team” had suggested to the board that firing Shokin would spell trouble for Zlochevsky because Shokin was “under control,” which Archer he understood that the then attorney general had been bribed.
An attorney general was bribed during Archer’s tenure on Burisma’s board, and the removal of that attorney was really bad for Burisma, but it didn’t seem like it was Shokin.
According to State Department emails, the Obama administration believed that Zlochevsky, Burisma’s chief executive, had “almost certainly” paid a bribe to Shokin’s predecessor, Vitaly Yarema, in December 2014 to close an investigation.
Archer and Hunter Biden were already on Burisma’s board at the time, having joined the board in early 2014.
Yarema, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine before Shokin, was accused of helping Zlochevsky by taking steps that resulted in the release of assets that had been confiscated by a British court. Yarema was the Ukrainian prosecutor who, according to the State Department, had received a bribe from Zlochevsky.
Shokin took over Yarema in February 2015 and began investigating Burisma, according to evidence, more aggressively.
In February 2016, 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 apparently had ties to Hunter Biden’s business orbit, the investigation into Zlochevsky ended.
Blue Star Strategies did not respond to a request for comment.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Messages and testimony collected by the Senate Homeland Security Committee and published in 2020 report show that Blue Star Strategies secured at least one meeting with Lutsenko and a Burisma executive, something they struggled to do with Shokin, according to other emails.
In other words, the prosecutor who replaced Shokin appeared more sensitive to Burisma’s lobbying efforts than his predecessor, contradicting Democratic claims that Joe Biden’s calls to fire Shokin could not be unethical because Shokin was friendlier to Burisma.
Español de Venezuela 
English 