Beginning in April 2014 — one month after then Vice President Joe Biden became “point man” for U.S. policy in Ukraine — Joe’s son Hunter took a directorship of Ukrainian energy company Burisma at a fee of $83,333 per month, or $1 million per year. Burisma was then strongly suspected of corruption, and within only a few months it came under official investigation, following the appointment in early 2015 of Victor Shokin as Ukraine’s General Prosecutor. Then in late 2015 and early 2016, VP Joe Biden engineered the firing of Shokin by threatening to withhold a billion dollars of U.S. aid, which aid he controlled at that time. Joe later admitted on a widely-viewed video that he threatened to withhold the U.S. aid as the means to get Shokin fired.

So was the million per year paid to Hunter a legitimate business transaction, or was it an obvious bribe to Joe to get him to leverage U.S. aid to Ukraine to protect Burisma from the prosecutor?

From the start, Joe and his minions have offered two defenses to the contention that this was a bribe: (1) Joe did not discuss his son’s business dealings, and was completely uninvolved; and (2) getting Shokin fired was official U.S. policy, and Joe’s tactics to accomplish the firing were merely implementing this official policy, and had nothing to do with the influence purchased with the million a year going to his son.

Defense number (1) was always absurd. For anyone other than the Bidens, payments to children of politicians are universally viewed as the complete equivalent of a direct payment to the politicians themselves for purposes of the bribery statute. But how about defense number (2)? In recent days, new facts have emerged that make defense number (2) equally untenable.

I won’t go into further detail today as to defense (1). If you think there might be something to that defense, I refer you to this post from March 2022, “The Rules About Corruption Just Don’t Apply To The Bidens,” and to the case of former New York State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos discussed therein. Skelos is currently serving a four-year jail term for bribery, the alleged bribe consisting of a couple of hundred thousand dollars (pocket change compared to Biden-level corruption), all of which went to his son Adam. The 2021 Second Circuit decision affirming Skelos’s conviction discusses the payments to Adam as if they are the same thing as payments to Dean. And, even if Biden’s “I was not involved” defense was not absurd on its face, it has been blown up as a factual matter in the past several weeks by revelations that Joe participated in at least 20 or so conference calls and in-person meetings with Hunter and his “business” associates.

But how about defense number (2), that Joe in getting Shokin fired was just implementing U.S. policy? That defense has now also been blown to smithereens by reporting over the past few days from John Solomon at Just the News. Here is Solomon’s piece from Monday (August 21), and here is his further piece from yesterday (August 23).

From the August 21 piece:

The narrative from Biden’s defenders and government officials who testified at Trump’s first impeachment was that Biden’s action in withholding the U.S. loan guarantees had nothing to do with his son’s role at Burisma and that officials across the West and inside the U.S. government were clamoring to fire Shokin because he was deemed corrupt.

However, documents uncovered by JTN through FOIA requests and from Congressional investigators reveal exactly the opposite story. The key document is an October 1, 2015 email memorandum circulated to a large inter-agency government group (including representatives from State, Treasury, DOJ, DOE, USAID, and others) concluding that Ukraine had made sufficient progress against corruption that it should get the new billion dollar loan guarantee. The document discusses potential conditions on the aid, without mention the name Shokin or a need to fire the prosecutor. Excerpt from the memo:

The IPC concluded that (1) Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee and (2) Ukraine has an economic need for the guarantee and it is in our strategic interest to provide one. As such, the IPC recommends moving forward with a third loan guarantee for Ukraine in the near‐term, noting State/F’s preference to issue the guarantee as late as possible to allow more clarity on the budget context and Embassy Kyiv and Treasury’s assessment that Ukraine needs the guarantee by end‐2015.

So what happened between October 1 and Biden’s trip to Kyiv (December 8) to change things and see Joe threatening to withhold the aid to get Shokin fired? Well, there was the November 2, 2015 email chain between and among Hunter Biden and his Burisma paymasters, discussed in my August 4 post here. In that chain Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi states that his “only concern” was that they [Burisma and Hunter] were on the “same page re our final goals,” with the Burisma executive confirming that the “the ultimate purpose” was “to close down” “any cases/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine.” “Nikolay” refers to Burisma’s chairman, Mykola Zlochevsky.

Then there was the dinner Hunter was having in Dubai on December 4, 2015, following a Burisma board meeting. Mykola Zlochevsky and Vadim Pozharsky (numbers one and two at Burisma) joined Hunter for a conference call to “D.C.” (according to the Congressional testimony of Devon Archer).

Solomon’s August 23 piece at JTN documents the sudden shift in U.S. position that followed:

The decision by Joe Biden and his closest policymakers to try to force Shokin’s firing evolved over several days before he left for the December 2015 trip to Kyiv. For weeks beforehand, U.S. officials at State, Treasury and Justice recommended Ukraine get its $1 billion in loan guarantees because Shokin's office had made adequate progress in anticorruption reforms. . . . By the time Biden got to Kyiv on Dec. 8-9, 2015, he had further altered the plan, deciding to threaten withholding the loan guarantees until Poroshenko fired Shokin, something he would brag about doing in a 2018 video tape.

At this point this is getting ridiculous. The firing of Shokin was not official U.S. policy at all (other than as dictated by Biden himself), and was in immediate response to a specific demand from Hunter’s paymasters at Burisma.

There has never been a U.S. President so obviously and thoroughly corrupt. It is shameful.