Hunter, Joe, And Secretary Blinken

While the fallout from Devon Archer's closed-door testimony to the Comer committee is likely to continue over coming days, this piece at Breitbart raises a parallel question, which is the role current Secretary of State Blinken played in the Bidens' Ukraine influence-peddling in the 2015-16 period.

6) October 2015: Senior State Department official Amos Hochstein raised concerns with then-Vice President Biden, as well as with Hunter Biden, that Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma Holdings’ board enabled Russian disinformation efforts and risked undermining U.S. policy in Ukraine.

7) November 2015: Burisma hired Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat lobbying firm, linked to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and instrumental in Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin’s firing.

Antony Blinken's career has been tied to Joe Biden's, especially through his wife, Even Ryan. According to Wikipedia, she

worked in the Obama-Biden White House as assistant to the vice president and special assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement from September 2013 to January 2017.

Prior to joining the Obama administration, Ryan served as deputy campaign manager for then-Senator Biden's 2008 presidential campaign,

As early as 2010, Hunter and then-partner Eric Schwerin were exchanging e-mails with her, while records also indicate that Hunter had several meetings scheduled with Blinken himself throughout the spring and summer of 2015, after he was put on the Burisma board. Questions about Blinken's 2015 involvement with Blue Star Strategies resurfaced this past May. According to the UK Daily Mail,

Blinken told Senate investigators under oath in 2020 that he had 'no knowledge of Hunter Biden's service on the board' of Burisma, and didn't know about Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat consultancy hired by the firm in 2015 to improve its image in Washington DC.

But State Department emails show he spoke with Blue Star's CEO Karen Tramontano at a political event around July 2016 while he was Deputy Secretary of State, and agreed to have a coffee with her to discuss 'some troubling events we are seeing in Ukraine'.

And July 14, 2016 emails from Hunter's laptop show the First Son checked in with Blinken's wife to try to make sure he took a call from Tramontano and her chief operating officer Sally Painter – as well as meeting with Blinken himself at his State Department office in July 2015.

There is no evidence that Blinken or Ryan tried to change US policy on Burisma’s behalf. [cough, cough]

But Senator Ron Johnson is now accusing the Secretary of State of having ‘lied bald-faced to Congress’ about his links to the murky influence campaign in 2020 sworn testimony.

Beyond that,

The government and laptop emails obtained by DailyMail.com suggest Blinken, who was Joe's senior campaign advisor, his Vice Presidential National Security Advisor in the Obama administration and now Secretary of State, may have been more aware of Hunter's dealings than he has let on.

Hunter joined the board of the allegedly corrupt Ukrainian company Burisma in April 2014, while the US authorities were working with British law enforcement on a financial investigation into its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky.

When Hunter's appointment became public soon after, it caused a firestorm of controversy – including among State Department officials, who complained in emails that 'the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anti-corruption agenda in Ukraine.'

However, the furor apparently passed by Blinken, who told investigators in sworn testimony that he was not 'aware of any association that Hunter Biden had with Burisma' while Deputy Secretary of State from 2015 to 2017, had no emails or texts with the First Son, and never discussed Hunter's financial or business arrangements with him.

Data on Hunter's laptop shows 26 emails involving Blinken's personal address and three with his Vice Presidential office address, between 2010 and 2018.

A further 47 emails include his wife Evan's VP office email and 22 have her personal email address.

The exact role of Hunter and then-Vice President Biden in removing Victor Shokin as the prosecutor investigating Ukraine in 2016 remains in dispute. However, controversies existed within the State Department reagarding Hunter's role:

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.

The email, obtained by Just the News, was written on Nov. 22, 2016 by former U.S. embassy official George Kent, one of the Democrats' star witnesses in their first effort to impeach former President Donald Trump.

. . . "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.

But if Joe was working with Hunter on Burisma's behalf, no quiet engagement was going to be effective. And what was then-Deputy Secretary of State Blinken's role in this controversy? This brings us to the question Holman Jenkins raised in the Wall Street Journal on Friday:

At some point, questions should also be asked of Barack Obama. Why allow Mr. Biden to control the Ukraine portfolio when he wouldn’t restrain his son? Was Biden family corruption the reason you skipped over your veep and endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016?

But Mr Jenkins's assumption is that Joe was somehow unable to control Hunter, when the evidence we're beginning to see is that they worked closely together. And this goes to issues 6 and 7 in the link at the top of this post, the role of Blue Star Strategies in forming US policy toward Burisma. It isn't clear to me how Blue Star was "linked to Secretary of State Antony Blinken" but there is no question that Blue Star had attracted investigative attention as early as 2019, before Hunter's laptop came to light. According to Sens Johnson and Grassley,

“Recent reports indicate that Blue Star Strategies (Blue Star) sought to leverage Hunter Biden’s membership on the board of directors for Burisma in its communications and meetings with various U.S. government officials at the same time his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, served as the ‘public face of the administration’s handling of Ukraine.’

“A recent report indicates that, in November or December 2015, Blue Star officials met with Amos Hochstein, then-senior advisor to Vice President Biden on international energy affairs, and invoked Hunter Biden during a discussion of Burisma. The report describes Mr. Hochstein as ‘a vocal proponent of Ukraine cracking down on Burisma,’ and explained that the purpose of the meeting was for ‘Blue Star Strategies [] to convince Hochstein (but [it] did not) that Burisma was on the level and did not warrant further investigation.’”

On one hand, as we see above in issue 6 at the link at the top of this post, Amos Hochstein at the State Department had been raising concerns about Hunter's role at Burisma by October 2015. By November or December, Blue Star was on Hochstein's case, and Joe himself traveled to Ukraine on December 7-8, 2015, apparently in the context of the struggle to remove Shokin as prosecutor. and he was in facxt removed in March 2016.

It's worth noting that Trump's first impeachment centered on issues related to Biden corruption in Ukraine, but so far, little attention has focused on trhe extent to which the information that's emerged in the past several months has served to vindicate Trump's allegations from this period. A question that's begun to emerge for me is then-Deputy Secretary Blinken's role in overriding objections within the State Department to the Biden policy aims regarding Burisma.

I have a feeling much more will come out. It looks to me aas though Holman Jenkins's implication is on target when he suggests that Hunter's activities were directly responsible for Trump's first impeachment.