What Is Amos Hochstein's Role In The Whole Nine-Year Ukraine Boondoggle?

I'm still working my way through the question I asked at the end of yesterday's post: By the time he was Obama's vice president, Joe Biden wasn't taken seriously. In January, 2014 -- just as the Maidan revolution and the Russian seizure of Crimea were in train -- The Atlantic was quoting Robert Gates, who had been defense secretary under both Dubya and Obama:

"I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says of Vice President Joe Biden in his new book coming out later this month.

And there's Obama's own estimate:

Speaking to a fellow Democrat about Joe Biden being the party’s nominee in 2020, Obama famously warned, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up.”

As a true crime fan, I tend to take the homicide detective's truism that there's no such thing as a coincidence to be a useful epistemological tool. But I'm still working my way through the question of how and why Joe Biden was made point man for Ukraine in 2014, except to note that although Joe was the public face of policy, Victoria Nuland and Amos Hochstein in particular were running the show, and in fact Nuland had set all the 2014 circumstances up throughout much of 2013.

The photo at the top of this post shows Amos Hochstein, his face characteristically turned away from the camera, speaking with Joe Biden on the April 21, 2014 flight to Kyiv aboard Air Force Two. Yesterday I quoted a link that referred to him as "the most influential Joe Biden adviser that most people don’t know about". His Wikipedia entry is remarkably vague, especially about what he was doing on the plane with Joe in April 2014.

After working in various roles as a congressional staffer, he went into the private sector as "a counselor and lobbyist for both domestic and international oil and gas companies" and worked in shadowy roles with, among others, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz to assist Equatorial Guinea's repressive regime "to display their political sincerity to change and to improve relations with the United States", which sounds a lot like the behind-the-scenes influence peddling we've seen more recently in Ukraine. But after this chapter,

Hochstein began working at the U.S. Department of State in 2011, joining the newly formed Bureau of Energy Resources. Serving as deputy to Special Envoy Carlos Pascual, Hochstein worked to help Ukraine find new supplies of natural gas in the wake of the 2014 Russian invasion.

He oversaw the Office of Middle East, Asia and Europe, the Western Hemisphere and Africa. Hochstein led the energy related diplomacy efforts.

So as best we can tell from this very sketchy timeline, as of April 2014, he was sora-kinda doing something or other about Ukrainian energy supplies, and he was on board Air Force Two with Joe Biden on the flight to Kyiv where Joe became Obama's point man in Ukraine, except his title of deputy special envoy doesn't really reflect anything like that.

On Thursday I linked to the transcript of a background briefing made by "a senior administration official" on that flight. Although "background" briefings are anonymous, I'm convinced that the "senior administration official" was Hochstein, as he's shown on the plane in the photo above, and no other senior figure is known to have traveled with Joe otherwise. One of Hochstein's points in the briefing was that Joe was traveling to Ukraine to present a whole US package, financial, military, and political, clearly implying an effort to address both the US-sponsored Maidan revolution and the Russian seizure of Crimea:

{I}t’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.

Obviously, the most pressing and acute right now is the security situation. But these other lines of effort are also existential for Ukraine. Its politics, its economics and its energy also matter acutely, and so they felt it was important to have somebody with deep ties to and a deep passion for the U.S.-Ukraine relationship to come and send that message both privately and publicly. And there’s no better messenger for that than the Vice President.

But the odd thing is that Hunter and his partners were involved in putting this package together from the start. Via a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee report I've linked previously here,

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.

In other words, Hunter's and Devon Archer's participation on the Burisma board were being factored into the whole Biden-visit package that was being presented to Ukrainian leadership during Joe's visit on April 21 and 22, 2014. This wasn't an afterthought, it was part of the whole program, security, military, financial, and Hunter. Hochstein's exact involvement in this initial phase is unclear, but by July of 2014, his behind-the-scenes role in the deal was understood by Hunter and Burisma:

In the summer of 2014, shortly after joining the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings, Hunter and his associates at Burisma and his now-defunct Rosemont Seneca Partners discussed speaking with Hochstein for contacts who could help navigate a new tax in Ukraine on private energy companies.

On July 31, 2014, top Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi expressed frustration in an email to the group that the Ukrainian parliament had "voted in favor of the package of laws, among which is a draft law on raising the tax for private gas producers."

Minutes later, Heather King, who did crisis communications for Burisma at the time and was in frequent communication with Hunter, said she was concerned by the news.

"This news is very concerning," she wrote. "I assume you will be sending an email to the State Dept today about this? We will also get you connected with the US Embassy contact so you can hopefully meet with the guy Hochstein recommended as soon as possible."

The implication here is that Hochstein was seen as some sort of uber-fixer who could get Hunter what Burisma needed. This is the first reference we have to contacts, however indirect, between Hunter and Hochstein, as well as a reference to what seems to have been a general understanding that the US embassy in Kyiv was running the whole show, which was also rhe implication in the notorious February 2014 recorded call between Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt.

This is only the start of Hochstein's puzzling involvement in the whole Hunter-Ukraine saga, but Hochstein is a shadowy figure throughout Joe Biden's later career. Since 2022, he's served as Joe's "Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security", and he is characterized, if he's characterized at all, as one of Joe's closest advisers. This 2022 piece says,

“He knows the domestic and international oil and gas issues very well, so he’s capable of speaking to them, but he’s also now a key figure in both domestic and international policy formulations,” said David Goldwyn, who served at the State Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and has known Hochstein for about two decades.

Hochstein, Goldwyn added, is “the person who bridges State, Treasury, the White House and Energy.”

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say he must also know where all the Ukraine bodies are buried, and that would include what Zelensky probably has on Joe, because Zelensky has it on Hochstein as well. I would say he can probably also give a good answer to why, if the Obama circle thought so little of Joe's abilities, Obama nevertheless made Joe the point man on the whole Ukraine package, likely because Hochstein would be the one actually in charge.

More tomorrow.