Joe Biden Ducks Questions About Conflict of Interest in Ukraine

Democratic presidential candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden speaks after exiting th
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Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed in an interview set to air Sunday morning that no one had been able to point to anything he had done wrong in Ukraine.

Biden told Manchester, New Hampshire’s WMUR-9:

My case has already been made. There’s not a single solitary person in this administration who said I did anything other than my job. Not anybody in the United States of America that has been involved at all. Not anybody abroad … I did my job, and I did it really well. The problem is here, this is all about Trump’s ability to take the focus off.

Biden’s claim contradicts the testimony of several of the witnesses Democrats themselves called in the House impeachment inquiry.

George Kent, Deputy Assistant Secretary in the European and Eurasian Bureau at the State Department, told the House Intelligence Committee that Biden had an apparent conflict of interest because his son, Hunter Biden, had been appointed to a well-compensated position on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, that was widely perceived to be corrupt.

Kent said that he brought the issue up in 2015: “I raised my concerns [with the vice president’s staff] that I had heard that Hunter Biden was on the board of a company owned by somebody that the U.S. Government had spent money trying to get tens of milljons of dollars back and that could create the perception of a conflict of interest.”

He added that the vice president’s office had said that Biden was too busy dealing with the tragic death of his other son, Beau. But nothing was done afterwards, either.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told the committee that she had been specifically briefed by the Obama administration before her confirmation hearing not to answer questions about Biden’s conflict of interest, but to direct all questions to the vice president’s office, instead.

Reporters had first raised the question of Biden’s apparent conflict of interest in 2014, after Hunter Biden’s appointment, but nothing was apparently done about it.

Biden himself admitted last week that the arrangement “looked bad.”

The full interview airs Sunday morning at 10:00 a.m. on WMUR-9.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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