Amos Hochstein Fights Corruption!

So let's recapitulate. By February, 2014, the US Deep State, acting through the CIA front National Endowment for Democracy and with the sponsorship of Victoria Nuland at the State Department, had engineered a coup in Ukraine that caused the elected president, who was pro-Russian, to flee the country. At the same time, Putin seized Crimea and much of the Donbas. Over the next two months, the Deep State drew up a plan for Ukraine to navigate these changed circumstances, and they sent two people, Vice President Joe Biden and State Department energy guy Amos Hochstein, to explain to Ukrainians how things were going to go forward in Kyiv.

The Biden-Hochstein team seems to have been ventriloquist and dummy, with Hochstein pulling the string that controlled Biden's mouth while Joe sat in his lap. From what Hochstein explained on background to the press during the flight over, the Deep State plan for a new Ukraine was comprehensive, domestic-political, military, and financial. One part, at least ostensibly, was key: the Maidan revolution, under whose name the coup took place, was against corruption. Ukraine was going to have to "make progress" against corruption, for which the deposed pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was the poster boy.

The new regime must not be corrupt, or maybe not quite as corrupt, as the old. The problem is that Ukraine was then and is still recognized as one of the most corrupt countries in the world; perhaps the least controversial remark by Col Douglas Magregor in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson was that on the corruption scale, Ukraine ranks somewhere below Mexico and Russia. Good intentions from the US embassy were not going to fix this.

And we can get an idea of actual Deep State priorities in the portfolio of the ventriloquist whom they sent over to speak for Joe Biden, the dummy on his lap. If they thought corruption was the biggest problem, they'd send a cop, maybe a retired FBI director. If they thought the biggest problem was military, they'd send a general. They sent neither. They sent an energy expert. Let's recall that as of 2014-15, according to Wikipedia,

He was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in 2011 and as Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs. In 2015, President Barack Obama nominated Hochstein to be the Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources but the Senate did not act on the nomination.

Let's check back on one key fact. What was Burisma? Again according to Wikipedia,

Burisma Holdings has operated in the Ukrainian natural gas market since 2002. It is one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine. It is owned by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky through his company Brociti Investments Limited

Burisma's subsidiaries include Esko-Pivnich, Pari, Persha Ukrainska Naftogazova Kompaniya, Naftogaz Garant, KUB-Gas and Astroinvest-Ukraine.

In 2016, Burisma was the second largest privately owned natural gas producer in Ukraine after DTEK, accounting for 26% of all natural gas produced by privately owned companies and more than 5% of total gas production in Ukraine.

Exactly why the Deep State apparently thought Ukraine's energy resources were so important that the guy who should be explaining how things were gonna be to the new regime in Kyiv should be an energy expert rather than an anti-corruption cop or a general is unclear, although this piece suggests that natural gas supplies from Russia had been a sore point between Ukraine and Russia for some time. The key point is that as an energy generalist and a natural gas specialist, Hochstein must certainly have known about Burisma, the second-largest producer in Ukraine.

Not only that, but Hochstein was apparently a major author of the new 2014 plan for how things were gonna be for Kyiv in the first place. Let's recall again that as the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee reported in 2020,

On April 16, 2014, Vice President Biden met with his son’s business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Five days later, Vice President Biden visited Ukraine, and he soon after was described in the press as the “public face of the administration’s handling of Ukraine.” The day after his visit, on April 22, Archer joined the board of Burisma. . . . Fourteen days later, on May 12, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, and over the course of the next several years, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were paid millions of dollars from a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch for their participation on the board.

It's really hard not to infer that if, within days of Hochstein delivering his comprehensive plan for how things were gonna be to Kyiv, Devon Archer and Hunter Biden wound up on the board of Burisma, this was not baked into that plan with Hochstein's full knowledge.

But Hochstein later told Joe that Hunter's presence on the Burisma board represented a conflict, right? As part of a general timeline of Hunter's dealings with Hochstein, the New York Post reported,

According to a Senate Republican report on Hunter’s business dealings released in December 2020, Hochstein in October 2015 raised concerns with both Biden and Hunter that Hunter's position on Burisma’s board enabled Russian disinformation efforts and risked undermining U.S. policy in Ukraine. He also had another conversation with Biden on the plane ride during the infamous December 2015 Ukraine trip.

That may be, but of course, that's Hochstein's version in Senate testimony. The record we have, outlined in the story at the link, is that this was only one of multiple meetings among Hochstein, Hunter, Joe, and Hunter's partners over the 2014-2016 period. For instance

On Dec. 11, 2014, Hochstein met with Biden and [Biden executive assistant Kathy] Chung in two separate meetings and later attended a holiday party at Biden's residence that same day. Four days later, Hochstein attended a "meeting" at the vice president’s residence, according to White House visitor logs.

Four months after those meetings, on April 16, 2015, Hochstein met with Biden in the West Wing of the White House, the visitor logs show.

That meeting took place the same day that Hunter introduced his father to Burisma executive Pozharskyi and other business associates from Kazakhstan and Russia during a dinner at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C., Fox News Digital previously reported. It is unclear whether Burisma or Pozharskyi's visit to D.C. was mentioned during that meeting.

In other words, Hochstein had been touching base with Joe, Hunter, and Hunter's partners throughout the period from April 2014 to November 2015, which led to a second trip by both Joe and Hochstein to Kyiv in early December 2015. This latter flight seems to have been just as important as an expression of US policy as the one in April 2014, but its key task this time was to crack down on corruption. Again according to the Post,

During Hochstein’s testimony, he recounted that he spoke with Biden about Burisma in the West Wing of the White House in October 2015. According to visitor logs, he visited the White House three times in October 2015, with two of the visits occurring in the West Wing and the other on the second floor of West Wing.

"We were starting to think about a trip to Ukraine, and I wanted to make sure that he [Vice President Biden] was aware that there was an increase in chatter on media outlets close to Russians and corrupt oligarchs-owned media outlets about undermining his message—to try to undermine his [Vice President Biden’s] message and including Hunter Biden being part of the board of Burisma," Hochstein told Congress, according to the report.

According to Hochstein, Biden told Hunter about the meeting, prompting Hunter to request a meeting with Hochstein, according to the 2020 Senate Republican report.

"You are all set to meet with Amos on Friday at 4pm for coffee," Joan Mayer emailed Hunter on Nov. 3, 2015. She later emailed Hunter to let him know the Nov. 6 meeting with Hochstein at a Starbucks in Georgetown had been moved to 3PM. Hochstein met with Biden in the White House Situation Room on Nov. 5, 2015, the visitor logs say.

. . . The report said Hochstein "did not go so far as to recommend that Hunter leave the board," citing the New Yorker.

. . . On Dec. 11, 2015, Hochstein met with Biden in the West Wing, just two days after the vice president returned from his infamous Ukraine trip, where he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid if Ukrainian leaders did not fire their top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. The Republican Senate report cited testimony that Hochstein also had a conversation with Biden on the flight over to Ukraine in December 2015.

It's hard not to conclude that Hochstein was fully aware of the issues raised by Hunter's presence on the Burisma board, that apparntly he'd heard complaints about it, which he passed on to Joe (at least in his version of events). Nevertheless, although he and Joe met several times in the leadup to the December 2015 flight, on the flight itself, and afterward, in a series of discussions that also involved Hunter, the upshot was that in the updated version of how things were gonna be that Hochstein and Joe took to Kyiv on December 4-5, 2015, the way to fight corruption was to fire Viktor Shokin. As of last night, Shokin has repeated:

On Saturday’s broadcast of FNC’s “One Nation,” former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin said he believed that both President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden were bribed.

According to the former prosecutor general, he said his firing by then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was done at the behest of then-Vice President Biden, who once boasted about it in a discussion with the Council on Foreign Relations.

“I have said repeatedly in my previous interviews that Poroshenko fired me at the insistence of the then-Vice President Biden because I was investigating Burisma,” Shokin said through a translator.

“You understood me correctly. This is how it was,” he added. “There were no complaints whatsoever and no problems with how I was performing at my job. But because pressure was repeatedly put on Poroshenko, that is what ended up in him firing me.”

As best we can infer, Amos Hochstein was the key architect of US Ukraine policy in the 2014-16 period, down to a detailed level. He did apparently respond to pressure, and when pressure was applied, he got with the program. At least in his version, he went to Joe with concerns about Hunter's presence on the Burisma board, even several times, but he got nowhere, and as a practical matter, the Deep State's practical policy was going to be corrupt oligarchs were OK to have in Ukraine, just as long as they were our corrupt oligarchs.

But recognize this is Hochstein's own well-scrubbed version of events, which he gave while he was out of the government. He left the State Department in 2017 with the advent of the Trump administration and returned to government in 2021 as a close "adviser"/handler to Joe. In 2022, he was promoted to Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security, where he is presumably again a shadow figure in charge of Ukraine and its energy resources. We may assume that following a four-year Trump interregnum, Ukraine policy is back to where it had been when Hochstein was in charge of things the first time.