Contrary to Joe Biden’s claims, the former vice president was introduced by his son Hunter Biden to a top executive of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma one year before the the elder Biden pressured Ukraine officials to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by the New York Post.
Biden has insisted he has “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”
But Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent an email to Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about one year after Hunter joined the company’s board for a 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,” Pozharskyi wrote. “It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”
Joe Biden is on video boasting that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. financial aid to Ukraine unless the country’s top prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma, was fired:
Joe Biden also has stated he didn’t discuss Hunter Biden’s business dealings with him:
The Post reported that in another email, in May 2014, Pozharskyi asked Hunter Biden for “advice on how you could use your influence” to benefit the company.
The Post reported the emails were on a computer that was dropped off at a repair shop in Delaware in April 2019 and never reclaimed.
The Post said other files found on the laptop included “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.”
The repair shop owner explained the MacBook Pro had water damage, but the customer never paid for the repairs or retrieved the computer or a hard drive on which the contents were stored.
“The shop owner couldn’t positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother and former Delaware attorney general,” the Post reported.
The items were seized by the FBI in December, the report said.
But the shop owner made a copy of the hard drive before turning it over and gave the copy to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, the report said.
Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, told the Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September. And Giuliani provided the Post with a copy of it on Sunday.
Joe Biden’s pressuring of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin came a few months after the thank-you note.
Shokin has said that when he was fired, he had plans to interview Burisma officials, including Hunter Biden.
Months later, Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer, also a Burisma board member, sent Hunter Biden an email chain about plans for tax increases.
In the emails, Pozharskyi said the Ukrainian cabinet had submitted new tax legislation to the parliament that “would kill the entire private gas production sector in the bud.”
Pozharskyi also said he was sharing the information with the U.S. Embassy in Kiev as will as the office of Amos Hochstein, the State Department’s envoy for international energy affairs.
Joe Biden repeatedly has rejected charges that there was a conflict of interest in Hunter Biden’s business operations.
In an interview with NBC’s ‘Today’ show last February, 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 said.
During a campaign event last winter in Iowa, Joe Biden scolded a man who raised the issue of Hunter Biden and Ukraine, saying, “You’re a damn liar man.”
“Biden continued berated the man, calling him “fat” challenging him to “do push-ups together, man.”
The Post said the FBI referred questions about the laptop to the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office, which said it would neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer charged that Giuliani has been peddling conspiracy theories about the Biden family, the Post said.
