Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY) falsely claimed during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing that “no actual evidence” links President Joe Biden to his family’s business dealings in Ukraine.
“So far we’ve seen no actual evidence of any lies or any support for Joe Biden being involved in anything having to do with Ukraine other than promoting US foreign policy,” Goldman stated toward Rep. James Comer (R-KY), chair of the committee.
“What is the allegation that we are hearing from our Republican colleagues about the connection to Joe Biden and Burisma?” Goldman asked.
“It is an email, from a Burisma employee thanking Hunter Biden for organizing a meeting with Vice President Biden. We know nothing about the substance of that meeting. We know nothing about how long they met. It was not on the vice president’s schedule,” Goldman said. “Chairman Comer, you have said in your opening statement that Joe Biden has lied to the American people. That is a bold, bold accusation.”
President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden on Saturday, August 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Goldman’s claim that no evidence links Joe Biden to his family’s business dealings in Ukraine, as related to Hunter Biden’s board seat on Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, is false.
In 2018, Joe Biden made an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations where he spoke about threatening to withhold military aid to Ukraine in 2016. Biden explained the tactic was to force the firing of a prosecutor Viktor Shokin, then-vice president and “point person” on Ukraine. The prosecutor was at that time investigating Burisma. Joe Biden explained the timeline of the tactic (transcript via RealClearPolitics):
And that is I’m desperately concerned about the backsliding on the part of Kiev in terms of corruption. They made—I mean, I’ll give you one concrete example. I was—not I, but it just happened to be that was the assignment I got. I got all the good ones. And so I got Ukraine. And I remember going over, convincing our team, our leaders to—convincing that we should be providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.
So they said they had—they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him.
I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
In April 2014, Hunter joined the board of Burisma, just two years before Joe Biden stated he forced the firing of the prosecutor investigating Burisma.
Despite Hunter’s lack of experience in Ukraine or the energy sector, he was paid $83,000 per month by the energy company — just weeks after his father was announced “point person” on U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine, according to Peter Schweizer, senior contributor at Breitbart News, detailed in his book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.
Joe Biden’s claim of firing the prosecutor while the prosecutor was investigating Burisma appears to be supported by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who detailed Joe Biden’s “previous demands to dismiss Prosecutor General Shokin” in a letter to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2019:
[O]n February 11, 18, and 19 of 2016, Vice President Biden held a series of phone calls with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko regarding previous demands to dismiss Prosecutor General Shokin for alleged corruption. Another phone call between the two took place on March 22, 2016, just seven days before Prosecutor General Shokin was removed from office on March 29, 2016.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill March 21, 2022, in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The timeline of events suggests Joe Biden threatened to withhold Ukrainian aid to have an investigation into his son’s company dropped — a scenario many suggest is a quid pro-quo.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Goldman ignored the coincidence.
Goldman also dismissed an email unearthed from Hunter’s “Laptop from Hell” between Hunter and Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma. In 2015, a day after Joe and Hunter Biden met with the Ukrainian business partners at Cafe Milano, Pozharskyi emailed Hunter his thanks for the “opportunity to meet your father.” Breitbart New’s Emma-Jo Morris, formerly at the New York Post, reported details of the meeting:
The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads.
An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.
The revelation of Joe Biden meeting a Biden family business partner comes as Hunter admitted in 2019 to ABC News that if his father had not been the vice president, he would not have been able to join the board of Burisma in 2014.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not, in retrospect,” Hunter responded. “But that’s—you know—I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.”
Joe Biden and his staff have claimed seven times the president has had no part in the family business.
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism.
Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from Hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing even to have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
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