What Did Obama Know?

A couple of stories came out yesterday that raise two questions about Joe's Ukraine timeline, neither especially new, but intriguing as we learn more context. The two questions ultimately boil down to, first, what did Obama know about Joe's Ukraine payoffs, and second, what does Zelensky have on Joe?

Red State brings up the first:

New questions are swirling about Joe Biden's involvement in Ukraine while he served as vice president during the Obama administration.

. . . How did things get to that point, though? A newly unearthed exchange from 2014 is providing a major clue. A "senior administration official" (at the time) gave a press briefing on background about Biden's now-infamous trip to Ukraine. According to one answer given, the now-president may have actually requested the role of overseeing American foreign policy in Ukraine. From there, the timeline only gets more suspicious.

The transcript of the press briefing, which took place on April 21, 20l4 aboard Air Force Two as Joe flew to Kyiv, can be found at the link. Red State quotes this passage:

Q Could you just say how this trip came about? Obviously the Vice President has a long history of diplomatic relations with Ukraine. Was this something that was his initiative? Did the President ask him to go because of those relationships? Or how did that come?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The reason I’m pausing here is it’s one of those -- it’s one of those conversations where it’s a little hard to say whether the President asked him or he said I want to go. It grew out of a conversation that the two of them had, and both of them agreed that it was important for the U.S. to send a high-level signal of support for all of the lines of effort that this government is undertaking.

A September 18, 2020 report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee puts Joe's April 21, 2014 visit to Kyiv in partial context:

In late 2013 and into 2014, mass protests erupted in Kyiv, Ukraine, demanding integration into western economies and an end to systemic corruption that had plagued the country. At least 82 people were killed during the protests, which culminated on Feb. 21 when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych abdicated by fleeing the country. Less than two months later, over the span of only 28 days, significant events involving the Bidens unfolded.

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.

The Red State link gives more details of Joe's, Devon Archer's, and Hunter's activites in the runup to the April 21 flight to Kyiv:

That's where the timeline comes in. Devin [sic] Archer, who recently testified in the House Oversight Committee's investigation into Biden family corruption, was told by Hunter Biden to buy a burner phone on April 13th, 2014. Just days later, Archer met with Joe Biden in the West Wing of the White House. On April 21st, 2014, the then-vice president was wheels-up, headed to Kyiv where he would eventually get Shokin fired.

There's no reason to believe that the flow of events shown above is a coincidence. Did Joe Biden specifically go to Barack Obama to position himself as the lead in Ukraine as part of a scheme to enrich his son (and by virtue, his family)? And did the infamous trip to Kyiv that ended with a big win for Hunter Biden and Burisma stem from the conversation with Archer? It certainly looks that way. This onion has a lot of layers, and we aren't near the center yet.

The Washington Examiner published a story in 2019 itemizing Joe's six trips to Ukraine. The first was on July 20-22, 2009, and appears to have been a routine diplomatic visit at the start of the Obama administration. The next didn't take place until April, 2014, five years later. The Senate committee report mentions the abdication of Ukraine's President Yanukovych following anti-corruption demonstrations, but it leaves out the Russian annexation of Crimea in January and February of that year, which took place in the power vacuum that resulted from the anti-corruption demonstrations.

Oddly, the "senior administration official" who conducted the press briefing had little directly to say about Crimea, but the implcation of his general gaseous diplospeak was that Ukraine's position vis-a-vis Putin had suddenly become a major focus of admiminstration policy, and in light of that, Joe was going to be in charge. As a result, from one visit in 2009, Joe then made five visits between 2014 and 2017.

But this brings us to the second of yesterday's stories, at Just the News. In 2014-15, Ukraine had moved up as a US area of interest, and official policy had involved non-lethal military support as an anti-Russian measure and pressure to limit corruption as a domestic political measure, which was reasonable enough if not very imaginative. For much of this time, Joe was with the program, but on his fifth trip to Kyiv, December 7-8, 2015, he suddenly reversed course:

Just a month earlier [November 2015], a task force of top State, Treasury and Justice Department officials had decided that Ukraine and its new top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, had made enough progress on anti-corruption reforms for the country to receive a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee.

They drafted a term sheet for the delivery of the new aid to then-President Poroshenko during Biden’s December 2015 trip to Ukraine, and were making plans to invite Shokin’s top staff to Washington in January for a high-level meeting. Shokin himself even got a letter from the State Department declaring it was “impressed” with his reform efforts.

But the vice president and his top advisers on Ukraine, including then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, had a very different plan that began unfolding that Thanksgiving holiday week. In fact, it was an about-face when it came to Shokin’s plight, according to two “goals and objectives” memos drafted four days before Thanksgiving on Nov. 22, 2015 and obtained by Just the News.

“There is wide agreement that anti-corruption must be at the top of this list, and that reforms must include an overhaul of the Prosecutor General’s Office, including removal of Prosecutor General Shokin, who is widely regarded as an obstacle to fighting corruption, if not a source of the problem,” the memos stated.

The odd thing is that we're seeing the start of what reporters like Seymour Hersh are now reporting is a split between the conventional deep state -- "a task force of top State, Treasury and Justice Department officials" -- and Biden loyalists, in particular Victoria Nuland, who advised Joe to reverse US policy on Shokin and use the leverage of the $1 billion loan guarantee to secure his removal. But this advanced only Biden family interests, not US interests as determined by the cabinet-level task force. The Just the News link continues,

A U.S. intervention into the domestic affairs of an ally like Ukraine was rare and intrusive, and the meddling has had years of fallout. And it turns out, according to documents obtained years later by Just the News, that Joe Biden and his son Hunter were both intensely focused on the same prosecutor at that same moment.

A few blocks away from the White House, Hunter Biden and his associates were trying to hire a crisis communications firm to deal with Shokin’s decision to revive a corruption investigation of the Burisma Holdings company where Hunter Biden served as a board member and received $1 million a year in compensation, according to documents reviewed by Just the News.

There can be little question that the sudden US policy reversal calling for Shokin's removal benefited the Biden family interests, while the Biden retainers like Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken, and Amos Hochstein were apparently on board with the sudden policy switch and continue to drive US Ukraine policy now. The problem is that the Ukraine policy we have is turning out to be yet another neoconservative war with no clear objective and no exit strategy, and signals are beginning to emerge that the Deep State is unhappy.

This strikes me, though, as a good start toward the insightful policy analysis we need over the origins of this war, which may well establish a link between short-term political scandal and longer-term policy error. And they date back to the Obama administration, its policy decisions, Joe's involvement, and his ability to override them. How could he do this, and what did Obama know?