Nobody's Keeping Score On Ukraine

Every time I see Ukraine news, I have to force myself to remember that we had one presidential impeachment over a Ukraine phone call and another instance where Joe Biden bragged about his influence there. During Joe's vice presidency, his son Hunter served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. And throughout this period, Russia has had annexation of parts or all of Ukraine on its agenda, which also affects US policy.

But I find very little anywhnere tht tries to parse this out, especially Hunter's role, since e-mails from the Hunter laptop strongly suggest that Hunter's and Joe's financial interests are closely intertwined. Here's the most complete account of Hunter's Ukraine career I can find and its connection to Joe's political influence as vice president:

Back in 2014 after a change of regime in Ukraine, Hunter Biden joined the board of a scandal-plagued Ukrainian natural gas company named Burisma. Hunter had no apparent qualifications for the job except that his father was the vice president and involved in the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.

He got paid up to $50,000 per month for the job and the situation constituted the kind of conflict of interest that was normally considered inappropriate in Washington until the Trump era.

The story then detours into how this is all Trump's fault, but I don't see how Trump could have anything to do with 2014, well before he even announced his campaign. But it goes on,

The Obama administration probably should have done something about this at the time, but the White House couldn’t literally force Hunter not to accept the job. And given the larger family context, you can see why Joe might have been reluctant to confront his son about it.

This would all be a small footnote in history except that by 2016, officials throughout the Obama administration and in Western Europe had come to a consensus that Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, wasn’t doing enough to crack down on corruption. Biden, as he later colorfully recounted, delivered the message that the West wanted Shokin gone or else loan guarantees would be held up, and Shokin was, in turn, fired.

There was nothing remotely controversial about this at the time. No congressional Republicans complained about it, and the European Union hailed the decision to fire Shokin. The reason there is video footage of Biden touting his personal role in this is it was considered a foreign policy triumph that Biden wanted to claim credit for, not anything sordid or embarrassing.

But Shokin, of course, didn’t want to go down on the theory that he was corrupt or incompetent. So he started offering another theory: he was fired for going after Burisma by Joe Biden operating on behalf of Hunter Biden.

The question of whether Shokin was actually investigating Burisma at all is a matter of dispute (the relevant Ukrainian players have told inconsistent stories), but this is clearly not the reason he was fired. The desire to push him out was fully bipartisan in the United States and reflected a consensus across European governments, not anything idiosyncratic to Biden.

The notion that firing Shokin was somehow problematic was not in the air until the New York Times ran a story co-bylined by Ken Vogel and a Ukrainian journalist named Iuliia Mendel (who a few weeks later would become Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s official spokesperson) highlighting Rudy Giuliani’s efforts at muckraking.

I have a sense that this story is doing everything it can to whitewash Joe's involvement, but no matter what, it concludes that Shokin's role is subject to dispute. But the account, while mentioning the current president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, omits that the president of Ukraine throughout the Bidens' involvement when Joe was VP after 2014 was Petro Poroshenko, whom Zelensky defeated in a landslide vote in the 2019 Ukraine presidential election. Poroshenko's account of his dealings with the Bidens in a 2020 interview is at best equivocal:

Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko denied Sunday that former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden ever approached him about Burisma Holdings, a gas company Biden’s son Hunter was a board member of.

“My absolutely clear answer: no, never,” Poroshenko told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on “Fareed Zakaria GPS.” “But I also cannot accept that, neither President Obama nor President Biden — Vice President Biden, nor President Trump, nor Vice President Pence never press[ed] me.”

Poroshenko became president of Ukraine in 2014, the same year that Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, a gas company based in Kyiv. At the time, Vice President Biden was working with the others in the Obama administration to help reform policy and root out corruption in Ukraine. Hunter Biden served on the board until early 2019.

U.S. President Donald Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have claimed, without corroborating evidence, that when he was vice president, Joe Biden inappropriately pressured Ukraine to remove a prosecutor who had launched an investigation into Burisma in order to protect his son.

Well, if Hunter waa collecting big baksheesh on the Burisma board, why would Joe ever need to pressure Poroshenko about anything directly? That's not how these things work. Whatever the truth of the matter, Hunter's tenure at Burisma generally coincided with the years of Poroshenko's term as president of Ukraine and ended around the time of Poroshenko's electoral defeat in April 2019.

This morning, a new report on Hunter in Ukraine emerged:

In an email kept from public view for more than five years, a top U.S. State Department official in Kiev wrote to Washington superiors at the end of the Obama-Biden administration that Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine "undercut" U.S. efforts to fight corruption in the former Soviet republic.

. . . Most importantly, the email's stark message directly conflicts with the narrative the mainstream media, State Department witnesses and Democratic congressmen gave the public two years ago, when they insisted Hunter Biden's lucrative job with the allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings — while creating the appearance of a conflict of interest — had no impact on U.S. efforts to fight corruption in that country.

"The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter's presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine," Kent wrote multiple high-ranking officials in the State Department in Washington.

. . . Kent's email described an intense pressure campaign by advocates for Burisma — including a former U.S. ambassador — to rehabilitate the Ukrainian company's corrupt reputation and to get Ukraine prosecutors to drop their criminal investigations of the company.

Kent even relayed to higher-ups that he had confirmed with Ukrainian prosecutors that Burisma officials had paid a $7 million "bribe" to make one of the cases against the company disappear. The bribe was allegedly paid at a time when Hunter Biden was serving on the Burisma board, a job that landed his firm more than $3 million from the Ukrainian energy company.

Kent explained to the officials in Washington that Burisma's long reputation for alleged corruption and anecdotes like the bribe were one of the main reasons Hunter Biden's affiliation with the company proved harmful to U.S. efforts to fight Ukrainian corruption.

If nothing else, it's interesting to me that Hunter's tenure at Burisma seems to have been at least with both Joe's and Poroshenko's tacit consent, even though in the estimate of US diplomats it undercut US interests. The assumption inthe e-mail seems to be that maybe somebody needed to explain this quietly to Joe. Right.

It's also interesting that Joe as president doesn't now seem to be on the same page with Zelensky, the guy who campaigned against and defeated Poroshenko, who effectively enabled Hunter. We'll have to see what develops.