The younger Biden reportedly put Burisma executives in touch with his father, who was then vice president.
The younger Biden reportedly put Burisma executives in touch with his father, who was then vice president.
A t a critical moment when executives of the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma were pressuring board members Hunter Biden and Devon Archer to do more to block the Ukrainian government’s prosecution of company founder Mykola “Nikolai” Zlochevsky, Archer says that Hunter Biden put Zlochevsky and another company executive directly in touch with then-vice president Joe Biden on a speakerphone call from overseas.
Days later, the vice president came to Kyiv. In meetings with then-president Petro Poroshenko and other top Ukrainian officials, Biden threatened that if a prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was not fired, he would withhold $1 billion in economic aid desperately needed by Ukraine as it tried to stand up a new government while fending off forcible Russian aggression on its eastern border. Shokin was then investigating Zlochevsky. Despite his ties to Poroshenko, Shokin was fired about four months later, under the threat from Biden, as well as an additional threat from the heavily U.S.-backed International Monetary Fund (IMF) to withhold about $40 billion in funding.
Archer, Hunter Biden’s longtime close friend and business partner, is expected to testify before the House Oversight Committee this week. A preview of his testimony about the early December 2015 phone call between Vice President Biden and Burisma executives was reported Monday by Miranda Devine of the New York Post.
A federal appeals court recently rejected Archer’s appeal of his 2022 conviction in a $60 million fraud scheme. (The name of Hunter Biden, Archer’s business partner, came up in the evidence, but Biden was not charged in the case.) Archer faces about a year in prison, in addition to tens of millions of dollars in fines and restitution costs. His predicament has given him an incentive, finally, to cooperate in investigations of the Biden family business of cashing in on Joe Biden’s political influence. Nevertheless, as we have seen with the data from Hunter Biden’s laptop, revelations by an FBI informant who had direct access to top Burisma executives, financial records, and other witness who have come forward, it may not be difficult to corroborate Archer’s testimony.
In my column this past weekend, I outlined the history of the Bidens’ dealings with Burisma. According to what Zlochevsky told an FBI informant, which is corroborated by emails from Burisma’s chief financial officer, Vadym Pozharsky, to Hunter Biden (as well as Pozharky’s statements to the same FBI informant), Hunter was installed on Burisma’s board, despite his lack of experience in and value to the company’s energy operations, in order to induce then-vice president Biden to use his political influence in the company’s favor.
The elder Biden had been given a lead role in the Obama administration’s policy toward the new regime in Kyiv after the Maidan revolt in Western Ukraine, which was encouraged by the Obama State Department, ended in the ouster of Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. Hunter Biden and Archer were paid over $4 million to sit on Burisma’s board. Much of that sum was paid while Biden was the incumbent vice president steering Ukraine policy. As Devine has further reported, Burisma slashed the Hunter payments by about half after Biden left office in 2017.
Zlochevsky told the FBI informant that he had not only spoken directly with both Joe and Hunter Biden, but had also paid them $5 million each in bribes in order to pressure the Ukrainian government to back off from prosecuting him. Zlochevsky told the informant that the payments to the Bidens were made through a complex array of companies and bank accounts, such that it would take investigators “ten years” to trace the money from him to Joe Biden.
Independently, it should be noted, congressional investigators — led in the Senate by Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wisc) and in the House by the Oversight Committee led by chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) — have shown that, beginning in the years that Biden was vice president and continuing as he planned his 2020 presidential bid, the Biden family raked in millions of dollars from foreign persons connected to several corrupt and anti-American regimes. Those payments were routed through a labyrinthine structure of bank accounts and companies, including LLCs set up by Hunter Biden when his father was vice president.
In May 2014, after Archer and then Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board, within days of a trip to Kyiv by Vice President Biden, Pozharsky — the company’s CFO, who later told the FBI informant that Burisma had hired Hunter to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems” — wrote an email to the new board members, with the subject line “urgent issue.” As I detailed in the column:
Pozharsky reminded his new partners about the new Ukrainian regime’s tormenting of Zlochevsky, which he referred to alternatively as “blackmailing” and as efforts to extort him for money. Because these tactics had been unsuccessful, the regime had now moved on to “concrete” legal actions aimed at “intimidating” Burisma’s commercial contacts and “destabilizing” its business. Consequently, Pozharsky stressed, “we urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message/signal, etc., to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions.”
The British government had just seized $23 million from bank accounts Zlochevsky maintained in London. And later, in December 2014, Zlochevsky allegedly paid a $7 million bribe to Ukrainian officials in an effort to fend off corruption investigations. Although a State Department official raised concerns with the vice president’s office about Hunter Biden’s ties to Zlochevsky, Joe Biden took no action to separate his son from Burisma — a company U.S. anti-corruption officials were actively encouraging the Ukrainian government to investigate.
Instead, despite the appalling appearance of the Hunter–Burisma arrangement, Hunter and Archer invited the Burisma CFO, Pozharsky, to attend an April 16, 2015, dinner party they threw for some business associates at Cafe Milano in Georgetown, at which Vice President Biden came by to meet these associates — notwithstanding Biden’s stubborn, never plausible, and increasingly absurd claims that he had no discussions with his son about foreign business dealings that were patently designed to monetize his political power. The following day, Porzharsky emailed the veep’s son: “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”
Porzharsky’s tone, however, was more desperate and threatening by November. Not only was Burisma seeing little if any benefit from the lavish payments to Biden and Archer; as Devine reports, the State Department was pushing Kyiv to do more on anti-corruption. In fact, on September 24, 2015, American diplomat Geoffrey Pyatt had given a speech in Odessa, invoking Zlochevsky’s name as a target on whom Ukrainian officials should focus corruption investigations. By then, Shokin had opened a probe against Zlochevsky and Burisma.
As my column related, Pozharsky emailed Hunter, Archer, and Biden business partner Eric Scherwin on November 2, 2015, bemoaning the lack of “concrete tangible results” since Hunter and Archer had been installed on the board. While the younger Biden had recently provided documents to his Burisma superiors laying out a strategy, Pozharsky bristled that these documents failed to
offer any names of top US officials here in Ukraine (for instance, the US Ambassador) or Ukrainian officials (the President of Ukraine, chief of staff, Prosecutor General) as key targets for improving Nicolay’s [i.e., Zlochevsky’s] case and his situation in Ukraine.
While conceding that the omission of names from written documents might be prudent under the circumstances, Pozharsky elaborated that this was acceptable only if everyone involved “in fact understand[s] the true purpose of the [Burisma] engagement and all our joint efforts,” and if they were “on the same page re our final goals.” In that vein, Pozharsky demanded a list of “concrete deliverables,” including “meetings/communications resulting in high-ranking US officials” visiting Ukraine in the coming weeks to meet with top officials of the Ukrainian government — including President Poroshenko. It was expected that these top American officials would “express their ‘positive opinion’ and support of” Zlochevsky and Burisma, in order to achieve the “ultimate purpose to close down for any cases/pursuit against [Zlochevsky] in Ukraine.”
About a month after Pozharsky’s email, Devine reports that Burisma officials met for a board meeting in Dubai, where Zlochevsky (who had been a minister in the ousted Yanukovych government) was living in exile to avoid prosecution by Ukraine’s new, Obama administration-supported Poroshenko government. On the late evening of December 4, 2015, after the board meeting at the Burj al-Arab Hotel, Archer and Hunter Biden went to the bar at the Four Seasons Resort at Jumeirah Beach to have a drink with a friend of Hunter’s. There, they got a call from Pozharsky, who said Zlochevsky needed to speak to Hunter urgently.
Shortly afterward, according to Devine’s preview of Archer’s testimony, Zlochevsky and Pozharsky met Hunter and Archer at the bar. Pozharsky bluntly asked Hunter, “Can you ring your dad?” Given the time difference, it was then early afternoon in the eastern United States. Hunter agreed and placed a call to his father.
When the vice president came to the phone, Hunter put the call on speaker mode and told him that he and Archer were together with “Nikolai and Vadym” from Burisma. Hunter explained that these Ukrainian business partners “need our support.” Devine reports that the call was short, with Biden greeting Zlochevsky and Pozharsky and exchanging vague pleasantries. (Archer is expected to testify that this was how Vice President Biden typically conducted himself in interactions with Hunter’s and Archer’s foreign business partners. Archer reportedly recalls about two dozen such conversations.)
Less than a week later, Vice President Biden was in Kyiv for a meeting with Poroshenko and other top Ukrainian officials. His visit included a speech before the Ukrainian legislature, the Rada, at which the vice president inveighed against corruption.
It was at the conclusion of this visit that Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion of U.S. aid if Poroshenko’s government failed to fire Shokin, the prosecutor. As Biden later bragged in a 2018 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), he told the Ukrainians, “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.” Biden concluded chuckling, “Well, son of a b****, he got fired.”
As I noted in the column, Biden’s remarks to the CFR were characteristically foolish and inaccurate. Shokin had ties to the Poroshenko regime, and it clearly did not want to fire him. He was not terminated within six hours, as Biden intimated; he kept his job for several months.
Tellingly, however, he was finally fired only after the West’s pressure was stepped up against Ukraine right when he was turning up the heat on Burisma. In early February 2016, Devine reports, Shokin’s investigators seized four houses in Kyiv, two plots of land, and a Rolls Royce belonging to Zlochevsky. About a week later, the IMF warned that it would halt its $40 billion aid program for Ukraine unless it stepped up its anti-corruption efforts. The United States was (and is) the IMF’s largest backer and thus exercises significant influence over its foreign-aid programs.
The firing of Shokin, for which Biden took credit, took place a few weeks later, in March.
Around the time of Shokin’s firing, the FBI informant reports meeting with Zlochevsky at a coffee shop in Vienna. As they discussed Burisma’s potential acquisition of a U.S.-based energy company, the informant warned that Shokin’s investigation could make such a business transaction in the U.S. unlikely. The informant recalls that Zlochevsky responded, “Don’t worry. Hunter will take care of all those issues through his dad.”
Author’s note: This column has been corrected to reflect that Devon Archer was convicted in a $60 million fraud scheme, as reflected in the links to news reports I included, not $60 billion, as I mistakenly wrote.