Retrieved emails allege Joe Biden was directly involved with Burisma, contrary to denials

Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-U.S. Vice
President Joe Biden, to a top executive at Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings less than
a year before the elder Biden allegedly pressured then-president Poroshenko to
fire the prosecutor general, who has since claimed to have been investigating
Burisma at the time, the nypost.com website reported on Oct. 14, citing emails
obtained from a laptop left at a repair shop. The never-before-revealed meeting
was mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to
the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden in April 2015, about a year
after Hunter joined the board of Burisma – Ukraine’s largest natural gas
extraction firm – at a reported salary of up to USD 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,” read the email, part of a slew the
nypost.com news site said it obtained from Rudy Giuliani, the president’s
personal lawyer who has worked for years to expose the Bidens’ alleged crimes
in Ukraine. An earlier email from May 2014 revealed how Pozharskyi, reportedly
Burisma’s No. 3 executive, asked Hunter Biden for “advice on how you could use
your influence” on the company’s behalf. The April 2015 correspondence
disproves Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his
overseas dealings,” the report said.

The emails came from a massive trove of data recovered
from a laptop left in a Delaware repair shop in April 2019 and never retrieved,
the nypost.com news site said. The shop owner said the computer bore a sticker
from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother. The computer
and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December after the shop owner said he
alerted the agency to it existence. But before turning over the hardware, the
shop owner said he made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to Giuliani’s
lawyer. In turn, Giuliani provided a copy of the data to the nypost.com on Oct.
11.

Recall, Ukraine’s parliament voted in March 2016 to
dismiss Viktor Shokin as prosecutor general. By that time, U.S. government
officials – including Joe Biden – and Western-sponsored NGOs had been publicly calling for Shokin’s dismissal for months
for interfering with anti-corruption efforts, particularly for failing to
investigate Burisma adequately (as opposed to insisting that Shokin drop the
investigations).

The first time it was publicly reported that Shokin
claimed to have been pressured to drop his investigations of Burisma was in April 2019, when John
Solomon of thehill.com published a column making the claim, citing what he
identified as the criminal case file and an interview with Yuriy Lutsenko. The
then-prosecutor general Lutsenko backed off the claim in a May 2019 interview
with Bloomberg News, in which he said the Burisma investigation was dormant at
the time of Shokin’s dismissal. But Shokin has continued to make the claim,
successfully getting Ukrainian law enforcement bodies – such as the State
Bureau of Investigations – to open criminal cases against Biden.

Zenon Zawada: Though the FBI is reported to have
seized this data in December, this evidence has only surfaced now, less than a
month ahead of the U.S. presidential elections (and provided by Trump’s close
confidante Rudy Giuliani, no less). So the timing is intended to hurt Joe
Biden’s image among undecided voters. However, we believe U.S. voters are not
interested in Trump’s relations with Zelensky, nor Biden’s relations with
Poroshenko. They are more concerned about the economy and law and order, which
we expect will provide U.S. President Trump with results similar to 2016, at
minimum.

In Ukraine, this latest information serves to chip
away at the credibility of the West in the view of the Ukrainian public. But we
also don’t see Ukrainians being very concerned, since they are also more
interested in the economy, as well as resolving the war in Donbas. Such
allegations won’t make many more Ukrainians hostile to the U.S. The biggest
consequence is that they add fuel to the current criminal investigations and
cases opened against the Bidens for their dealings in Ukraine.