Investigate Bidengate Before Impeachment

The Senate cannot determine if Donald Trump's investigation of Bidengate was appropriate without investigating Bidengate. The basic facts imply Joe Biden's actions could have hampered the Obama administration’s effort to curb Ukraine’s endemic corruption. After Vice President Joe Biden began his investigation the oil & gas company Burisma Holdings hired his son Hunter Biden. Joe Biden admits he leveraged his White House position to have then Ukraine's leading prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired in March 2016, but claims it was because Shokin wasn’t doing enough.

People in the prosecutor's office might have felt Vice President Joe Biden didn’t want them to investigate his son's employer or even that they should investigate rivals of Burisma Holdings instead.

.Only a full investigation can determine if Vice President Joe Biden’s actions discouraged or encouraged corruption in Ukraine

John Solomon: A dozen document troves that could change the Ukraine scandal if Trump released them
FR POSTED | 11/26/2019 by SeekAndFind

There are still wide swaths of documentation kept under wraps inside government agencies like the State Dept that could substantially alter the public’s understanding of what has happened in the US-Ukraine relationships now at the heart of the impeachment probe.

As House Democrats mull whether to pursue impeachment articles and the GOP-led Senate braces for a possible trial, here are 12 tranches of government documents that could benefit the public if President Trump ordered them released, and the questions these memos might answer.

<><> Daily intelligence reports from March through August 2019 on Ukraine’s new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his relationship with oligarchs and other key figures. What was the CIA, FBI and U.S. Treasury Department telling Trump and other agencies about Zelensky’s ties to oligarchs like Igor Kolomoisky, the former head of Privatbank, and any concerns the International Monetary Fund might have? Did any of these concerns reach the president’s daily brief (PDB) or come up in the debate around resolving Ukraine corruption and U.S. foreign aid? CNBC, Reuters and The Wall Street Journal all have done recent reporting suggesting there might have been intelligence and IMF concerns that have not been fully considered during the impeachment proceedings.

<><>State Department memos detailing conversations between former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko. He says Yovanovitch raised the names of Ukrainians she did not want to see prosecuted during their first meeting in 2016. She calls Lutsenko’s account fiction. But State Department officials admit the U.S. embassy in Kiev did pressure Ukrainian prosecutors not to target certain activists. Are there contemporaneous State Department memos detailing these conversations and might they illuminate the dispute between Lutsenko and Yovanovitch that has become key to the impeachment hearings?

<><>State Department memos on U.S. funding given to the George Soros-backed group the Anti-Corruption Action Centre. There is documentary evidence that State provided funding to this group, that Ukrainian prosecutor sought to investigate whether that aid was spent properly and that the U.S. embassy pressured Ukraine to stand down on that investigation. How much total did State give to this group?
Why was a federal agency giving money to a Soros-backed group? What did taxpayers get for their money and were they any audits to ensure the money was spent properly? Were any of Ukrainian prosecutors’ concerns legitimate?

<><> The transcripts of Joe Biden’s phone calls and meetings with Ukraine’s president and prime minister from April 2014 to January 2017 when Hunter Biden served on the board of the natural gas company Burisma Holdings. Did Burisma or Hunter Biden ever come up in the calls? What did Biden say when he urged Ukraine to fire the prosecutor overseeing an investigation of Burisma? Did any Ukrainian officials ever comment on Hunter Biden’s role at the company? Was any official assessment done by U.S. agencies to justify Biden’s threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid if Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin wasn’t fired?

<><> All documents from an Office of Special Counsel whistleblower investigation into unusual energy transactions in Ukraine. The U.S. government’s main whistleblower office is investigating allegations from a U.S Energy Department worker of possible wrongdoing in U.S.-supported Ukrainian energy business. Who benefited in the United States and Ukraine from this alleged activity? Did Burisma gain any benefits from the conduct described by the whistleblower? OSC has concluded there is a “substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” involved in these activities.

<><>All FBI, CIA, Treasury Department and State Department documents concerning possible wrongdoing at Burisma Holdings. What did the U.S. know about allegations of corruption at the Ukrainian gas company and the efforts by the Ukrainian prosecutors to investigate? Did U.S., Latvian, Cypriot or European financial authorities flag any suspicious transactions involving Burisma or Americans during the time that Hunter Biden served on its board? Were any U.S. agencies monitoring, assisting or blocking the various investigations? When Ukraine reopened the Burisma investigations in March 2019, what did U.S. officials do?
All documents from 2015-16 concerning the decision by the

<><> State Department’s foreign aid funding arm, USAID, to pursue a joint project with Burisma Holdings. State official George Kent has testified he stopped this joint project because of concerns about Burisma’s corruption reputation. Did Hunter Biden or his American business partner Devon Archer have anything to do with seeking the project? What caused its abrupt end? What issues did Kent identify as concerns and who did he alert in the White House, State or other agencies?

<><> All cables, memos and documents showing State Department’s dealings with Burisma Holding representatives in 2015 and 2016. We now know that Ukrainian authorities escalated their investigation of Burisma Holdings in February 2016 by raiding the home of the company’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. Soon after, Burisma’s American representatives were pressing the State Department to help end the corruption allegations against the gas firm, specifically invoking Hunter Biden’s name. What did State officials do after being pressured by Burisma? Did the U.S. embassy in Kiev assist Burisma’s efforts to settle the corruption case against it? Who else in the U.S. government was being kept apprised?

<><> All contacts that the Energy Department, Justice Department or State Department had with Vice President Joe Biden’s office concerning Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden or business associate Devon Archer. We now know that multiple State Department officials believed Hunter Biden’s association with Burisma created the appearance of a conflict of interest for the vice president, and at least one official tried to contact Joe Biden’s office to raise those concerns. What, if anything, did these Cabinet agencies tell Joe Biden’s office about the appearance concerns or the state of the various Ukrainian investigations into Burisma?

<><> All memos, emails and other documents concerning a possible U.S. embassy’s request in spring 2019 to monitor the social media activities and analytics of certain U.S. media personalities considered favorable to President Trump. Did any such monitoring occur? Was it requested by the American embassy in Kiev? Who ordered it? Why did it stop? Were any legal concerns raised?

<><> All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning efforts by individual Ukrainian government officials to exert influence on the 2016 U.S. election, including an anti-Trump Op-Ed written in August 2016 by Ukraine’s ambassador to Washington or efforts to publicize allegations against Paul Manafort. What did U.S. officials know about these efforts in 2016, and how did they react? What were these federal agencies’ reactions to a Ukrainian court decision in December 2018 suggesting some Ukrainian officials had improperly meddled in the 2016 election?

<><> All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning contacts with a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa and her dealings with the Ukrainian embassy in Washington or other Ukrainian figures. Did anyone in these U.S. government agencies interview or have contact with Chalupa during the time the Ukraine embassy in Washington says she was seeking dirt in 2016 on Trump and Manafort?

FR POSTED-— John Solomon: Documents Show Connection Between Hunter Biden Attorneys and Fired Ukrainian Prosecutor

(Sep. 25, 2019) — On Wednesday night’s “Hannity,” investigative reporter John Solomon of The Hill said he has acquired “more than 450 pages” of documents from the State Department and Hunter Biden’s “legal team” demonstrating that the attorneys were working to stop an investigation launched by then-Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin into principals of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden was a Board member in 2014 and 2015.

Hunter Biden is the son of former putative Vice President Joseph Biden, who is a 2020 Democrat presidential candidate.

In April 2014, the younger Biden became a Burisma Board member after then-White House occupant Barack Hussein Obama assigned the elder Biden to handle relations with Ukraine following the Russian invasion and “annexation” of Crimea earlier that year.

Solomon quoted former Vice President Joe Biden as having said that when he urged the firing of Viktor Shokin was that he “solely because he believed that prosecutor was corrupt and not because that prosecutor was investigating his son’s company and making plans to interview Hunter Biden at the very moment he was fired. That’s his story; that has to hold up.”

Shokin served under former Ukrainian President Petro Poroschenko, who lost re-election in April to Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Solomon’s stunning news will be the subject of Hannity’s top story on Thursday, host Sean Hannity announced. “There are documents from Hunter Biden’s legal team – the legal team from America – trying to assist Burisma to get out of this investigation. They show unequivocally that that legal team told the prosecutors as soon as Mr. Shokin was fired – in fact, the day that Shokin was fired – that the Biden team was trying to reach the new prosecutor. So people say there’s no connection between the events; why was Biden’s legal team rushing to talk to the new guy immediately?”

Solomon further said that Hunter Biden’s attorneys advanced a false story to the new prosecutor about Shokin.

In recent days a 2018 video surfaced of the elder Biden recounting to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) that in 2016, he pressured the Poroschenko regime to fire Shokin within the six-hour time frame remaining on Biden’s then-presence in the Ukraine, reinforced by what Biden said was his threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. loans. Invoking an epithet, Biden bragged that his demand was met.

According to the Kyiv Post, Poroschenko is now under criminal investigation by the Zelenskiy government.

“How many documents are you talking about from Hunter Biden’s legal team going to Burisma Holdings and others, and how — Does it show a cover-up? Does it show the vice president’s involvement at a deeper level than we previously knew?” Hannity asked Solomon.

Faulting an NBC reporter and the media in general for failing to perform due diligence on the story, Solomon said, “We are going to see documents from the State Department; documents from Hunter Biden’s legal team; text messages from Hunter Biden’s own business partner, Kevin Archer, who joined him on the Board, and official documents from the Ukraine government that they’ve given me on the record — all these documents tell a very different story than Joe Biden’s narrative to the American voter.”

On Monday, The Associated Press reported:

In a Fox News interview on May 19, Trump claimed the former Ukrainian prosecutor “was after” Joe Biden’s son and that was why the former vice president demanded he be fired. There is no evidence of this.

Ukraine’s current prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, was quoted by Bloomberg News in May as saying he had no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden or his son. Bloomberg also reported that the investigation into Burisma was dormant at the time Biden pressed for Shokhin’s ouster.

Hunter Biden was reportedly paid $50,000 USD monthly for his Board service.

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