NYT: New Details Emerge About Connection Of Bidens To Ukrainian Corruption Scandal

In a report highlighted by President Trump Wednesday, The New York Times provides new details that have emerged about Hunter Biden’s connection to a Ukrainian political corruption scandal as the government has reopened an investigation into a company which once paid Hunter as much as $50,000 a month. That company, Burisma Holdings, was being targeted by Ukraine’s top prosecutor — a prosecutor Hunter’s father, Vice President Joe Biden, pressured the Ukrainian government to remove.

Trump promoted the Times’ report by retweeting a post by co-author Kenneth P. Vogel: “NEW: The BIDENS are entangled in a Ukrainian corruption scandal:@JoeBiden pushed Ukraine to fire a prosecutor seen as corrupt,” tweeted Vogel, linking to his report. “BUT the prosecutor had opened a case into a company that was paying HUNTER BIDEN. The Bidens say they never discussed it.”

In what the Times describes as one of Biden’s “most memorable performances,” the then-vice president went to Kiev in March 2016​ and “threatened to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if Ukraine’s leaders did not dismiss the country’s top prosecutor [Yuriy Lutsenko], who had been accused of turning a blind eye to corruption in his own office and among the political elite.”

Biden’s pressure tactic was a success; the Ukrainian Parliament soon removed Lutsenko. But, it turns out, Biden’s son may have benefited significantly by his father’s actions.

“Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s younger son, who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general,” Vogel reports.

While Hunter Biden had some significant credentials, including a law degree from Yale and having served on the boards of Amtrak and a few nonprofit organizations and think tanks, he “lacked any experience in Ukraine and just months earlier had been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine,” Vogel notes. Despite his lack of relevant experience and drug problem, Burisma Holdings paid him “as much as $50,000 per month in some months for his work for the company.”

The Bidens have denied any wrongdoing and Joe Biden insists he never discussed the matter with his son, but the reopening of the investigation into Burisma has put the spotlight once again on the corruption scandal and the Bidens’ connection to it. The new information that has come to light, the Times reports, shows “how Hunter Biden and his American business partners were part of a broad effort by Burisma to bring in well-connected Democrats during a period when the company was facing investigations backed not just by domestic Ukrainian forces but by officials in the Obama administration.”

Hunter Biden denies having any role in shielding Burisma, whose board he was a member of from spring of 2014 until last month. “I have had no role whatsoever in relation to any investigation of Burisma, or any of its officers,” he told the Times in a statement Wednesday. “I explicitly limited my role to focus on corporate governance best practices to facilitate Burisma’s desire to expand globally.” (Read the full report here.)

As The Daily Wire reported in late March, Peter Schweizer, Government Accountability Institute president and author of bestselling book “Clinton Cash,” calls attention to the Bidens’ problematic Ukrainian involvement in his new investigative book, “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.” Schweizer appeared on Fox News to summarize some of the book’s key findings. Video below via Fox News: