In the latest development in the Hunter and Joe Biden corruption saga, emails obtained by The New York Post show that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then the vice president, to a top executive at Burisma less than a year before Joe Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor investigating the company.
The Emails
This newly revealed meeting was mentioned in a message of appreciation sent by adviser to the board of Burisma Vadym Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015. This message was sent approximately one year after Hunter joined the board of Burisma, where he was making around $50,000 per 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.
A May 2014 email from Pozharskyi shows him asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.
Directly contradicting Joe Biden‘s claim that he has “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” these emails were found in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.
The laptop was left at a repair shop in Delaware, Biden’s home state, in April of 2019, according to the store’s owner.
According to The New York Post, “Other material extracted from the computer includes a raunchy, 12-minute video that appears to show Hunter, who’s admitted struggling with addiction problems, smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with an unidentified woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images.”
According to the shop owner, who said that he repeatedly tried to contact the client, the customer who brought in the water-damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service, or retrieved the laptop or the hard drive on which its contents were stored.
The shop owner was unable to positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but did say that a sticker on the laptop was from the Beau Biden Foundation, which was named after Hunter’s late brother.
According to pictures of a Delaware federal subpoena which were given to The New York Post, both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December after the shop’s owner alerted the feds to their existence.
The shop owner also said that prior to turning over the laptop, he made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer Robert Costello.
The Post was informed of the existence of the hard drive in late September by Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump. A copy of it was provided to the outlet by Giuliani on Saturday.
Less than eight months after the aforementioned email where Pozharskyi thanked Hunter for introducing him to his father, then-Vice President Biden admitted to pressuring Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk into removing Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, threatening to withhold a U.S. loan guarantee of $1 billion during a trip to Kiev in December 2015.
“I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Biden infamously bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018.
“Well, son of a bitch. He got fired,” Biden continued.
Shokin has since revealed that at the time of his firing in March of 2016, he had made “specific plans” to investigate Burisma which “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”
Joe Biden has claimed that the United States had wanted Shokin removed over allegations of corruption.
Joe Biden has insisted that the US wanted Shokin removed over corruption concerns, which were shared by the European Union.
In another email, which was dated May 12, 2014, Pozharskyi attempts to get Hunter to use his political leverage to help Burisma.
The subject line of the message, which was also sent to Hunter’s business partner and fellow Burisma board member Devon Archer, read “urgent issue”.
Pozharskyi said that “the representatives of new authorities in power tend to quite aggressively approach N. Z. unofficially with the aim to obtain cash from him.”
N.Z. isn’t identified in the email but may be a reference to Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky, whose first name is a Ukrainian version of “Nicholas.”
When the alleged shakedown failed, “they proceeded with concrete actions” in the form of “one or more pretrial proceedings,” Pozharskyi wrote.
“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,” he added.
Hunter Biden responded by saying he was in Doha, Qatar with Archer, and asked for more information about “the formal (if any) accusations being made against Burisma.”
“Who is ultimately behind these attacks on the company? Who in the current interim government could put an end to such attacks?” he added.
The email exchange came the same day that Burisma had announced it had expanded its board of directors by adding Hunter Biden, who was put in charge of its “legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations,” according to a news release that’s since been removed from Burisma’s website.
Though the announcement that Hunter was added to the board came later, he actually joined the board in April 2014, according to multiple reports.
Hunter’s lawyer said last year that he was “not a member of the management team,” adding, “At no time was Hunter in charge of the company’s legal affairs.”
Approximately four months after the email correspondence between Hunter Biden and Pozharskyi, Archer forwarded an email chain to Hunter which had the subject line “tax raise impact on Burisma production,” and included Pozharskyi saying that the Ukrainian cabinet had submitted new tax legislation to the country’s parliament.
“If enacted, this law would kill the entire private gas production sector in the bud,” Pozharskyi wrote.
In the email, which was dated Sept. 24, 2014, Pozharskyi also said he was “going to share this information with the US embassy here in Kyiv, as well as the office of Mr Amos Hochstein in the States.”
At the time of the email, Hochstein was the U.S. State Department’s newly appointed special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs.
Later, in December of 2017, it was announced that Hochstein had joined the Naftogaz Group, Ukraine’s state-owned energy company, as an independent director. He has since resigned.
“The company has been forced to spend endless amounts of time combating political pressure and efforts by oligarchs to enrich themselves through questionable transactions,” Hochstein wrote in an op-ed published by the Kyiv Post.
Response From The Bidens
Not only has Joe Biden denied that he ever spoke with his son about his foreign business dealings, but he has also denied any conflict of interest or wrongdoing by himself or his son involving Burisma.
In February of last year, Biden got angry during an interview on NBC when co-host Savannah Guthrie asked whether it was “wrong for [Hunter] to take that position, knowing that it was really because that company wanted access to you.”
“Well, that’s not true. You’re saying things you do not know what you’re talking about,” Joe Biden responded.
The FBI referred questions about the seizure of the laptop and hard drive to the Delaware US Attorney’s Office, where a spokesperson said, “My office can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.”
A lawyer for Hunter Biden refused to comment on the specifics, and instead attacked Giuliani.
“He has been pushing widely discredited conspiracy theories about the Biden family, openly relying on actors tied to Russian intelligence,” the lawyer, George R. Mesires, said of Giuliani.
According to The Post, “Pozharskyi and the Joe Biden campaign did not return requests for comment. Hochstein could not be reached.”
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