According to an unidentified informant businessman, the founder of Burisma recounted being pressured by then Vice-President Joe Biden to put Biden’s son Hunter on the Ukrainian energy company’s board, and for $10 million dollars in bribes – $5 million each to Joe and Hunter Biden – in order to use Biden’s political influence to force the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.
The prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was fired by the Ukrainian government a few months after Vice President Biden, in late 2015, threatened then-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko that the Obama administration would withhold $1 billion in congressionally approved U.S. funding unless Kyiv fired Shokin. Biden later bragged about the threat in a 2018 interview at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The bribery information was provided to the FBI in a series of meetings with the informant beginning in 2017. Those meetings were summarized in re-interview of the informant on June 30, 2020, and outlined in a Form 1023, the standard FBI form used to record information from an interview with a confidential human source (CHS). As National Review previously recounted, this 1023 report has been the subject of an extensive dispute between the House Oversight Committee, which subpoenaed the document, and the FBI, which fought its release and then made a redacted version of the document available to the committee with significant restrictions.
The 1023 report, with minimal redactions, is here.
It was released this afternoon by Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), who explains that he obtained the document via legally protected disclosures by Justice Department whistleblowers. Indeed, the senator has previously explained that it was through whistleblower agents that he learned of the existence of the document.
Senator Grassley and the House Oversight Committee, led by Chairman James Comer, have been pressing the FBI for an explanation of what, if any, follow-up investigation has been done regarding extensively detailed disclosures that implicate now-President Biden in a $10 million bribery scheme (among other corrupt acts) from a CHS with a track-record of reliability. Thus far, the FBI and its Justice Department superiors have declined to respond to those inquiries.
Burisma’s founder and CEO is Mykola Zlochevsky. The CHS, a businessman, first dealt with him indirectly in the 2015-16 time frame. The CHS was introduced to Burisma executives by an associate, identified as Oleksandr Ostapenko, who accompanied the CHS to a meeting at Burisma headquarters to discuss the company’s acquisition of a U.S. energy firm that would allow them to IPO in the U.S.
During the meeting, Burisma CFO Vadim Pojarskii listed the company’s board of directors, which included the former president and prime minister of Poland as well as Hunter Biden who, he said, was brought on “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”
The CHS then asked why Burisma needed his assistance with the acquisition of a U.S. energy company given Hunter Biden’s involvement, prompting Pojarskii to concede that the younger Biden’s limited intelligence meant he was of little value outside of the influence he could exercise over his father.
At a subsequent meeting two months later, the CHS expressed concern that Shokin’s investigation of Burisma would damage the company’s prospective IPO in the U.S. Zlochevsky, the Burisma CEO, replied something to the effect of, “don’t worry Hunter will take care of all of those Issues through his dad.” He went on to say that he had paid $5 million each to Hunter and Joe Biden, an admission the CHS said was not at all unusual in Eastern European circles, where businessman enjoy bragging about their influence.
In a subsequent phone call that occurred shortly after the 2016 election, Zlochevsky expressed disappointment that President Trump had been elected and said that he had never wanted to pay off the Bidens but was “pushed to pay” them, even using the Russian term “poluchili,” a slang term often employed by criminals to describe being forced to pay a bribe.