Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of the Ukrainian gas company Brisma Holding, and Hunter Biden
FBI-obtained emails detail how Hunter Biden was offered a position in Ukrainian gas in 2014
The memos show a concerted strategy to use Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Kiev to close the Burisma Holdings deal.
In the weeks leading up to the 2014 deal with a Ukrainian gas company, Hunter Biden strategized with his business partners on how to use his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden’s upcoming official trip to Kiev to reach the lucrative arrangement, according to emails obtained by the FBI a year ago.
Correspondence reviewed by Just the News shows the younger Biden referred to his father as “my man” and gave credit for “adding value” to comments the vice president made to the Ukrainian leader about natural gas production that could benefit his new client.
The memo also shows how Hunter Biden pressed for Brisma Holdings to sign some sort of consulting agreement with him and his business partner, Devin Archer, before the U.S. vice president’s April 21-22, 2014, visit to Ukraine.
Joe Biden and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko
In a detailed strategic email to Archer on April 13, 2014, a week before his father’s high-profile visit, Hunter Biden wrote, “The contract should start now-not after my guy’s upcoming visit.”
The memo reveals that Hunter Biden knew he would be appointed to the Brisma board with Archer in mid-April 2014 – a month before the appointment was announced. He also wanted Brisma to pay him or his law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner (referred to as “BSF” in the email), an additional consulting fee.
Hunter-Biden wrote: “The deal with Brisma should include a retainer/additional fee in the 25k p/m range, and where appropriate, more in-depth work to go to BSF to protect us, completely separate from our respective deals, to reengage the board.”
(“Letter from Robert Hunter Biden to Devin Archer”)
Records previously obtained by Just the News show that Brisma paid a $250,000 retainer to Boies Schiller Flexner on July 5, 2014, as well as more than $3 million between 2014 and 2016 to a company called Rosemont Seneca Bohais, which is associated with Archer and Hunter Biden.
The emails were provided to the FBI last December as part of a laptop hard drive believed to belong to Hunter Biden that was left at a repair store in Delaware. Store owner John Paul McIsaac turned over a copy of the hard drive to agents, according to a federal grand jury subpoena.
McIsaac’s attorney, Brian Della Rocca, confirmed to Just the News on Tuesday that emails detailing Hunter Biden’s 2014 efforts to secure the Brisbane deal were on the hard drive that was turned over to the FBI.
Hunter Biden confirmed Dec. 9 that he is under criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware for “tax matters,” but he and his father have insisted they did nothing wrong.
Joe Biden on Tuesday doubled down on his earlier claim that the information on his laptop was “Russian disinformation” designed to discredit his family. But the nation’s top spy, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, claimed there was no evidence the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign, a claim the FBI did not dispute and said it had nothing to add to Ratcliffe’s assessment.
A senior law enforcement official told Just the News that the FBI is treating the laptop as evidence and, in some cases, has corroborated its information from other sources, including cooperating witnesses and other data repositories.
George Mesires, one of Hunter Biden’s lawyers, did not respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday.
If confirmed by the FBI, the emails would provide the most direct evidence yet of how Hunter Biden used his father’s name to strike business with a Ukrainian company run by an oligarch then under criminal investigation. The emails provide no indication that Joe Biden knew what his son was doing in Ukraine.
In an April 13, 2014, email to Archer, Hunter Biden said he and his partners should portray Joe Biden’s visit to Ukraine as part of their consulting deliverables and “request a long-term agreement and full participation” in Brisma’s business. Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine was announced just one day ago.
The email said, “Announcing my guy’s upcoming trip should be characterized as part of our advice and thinking – but what he will say and do is out of our control. In other words, it could be a very good thing, or it could end up creating too much expectation. We need to temper our expectations for this visit.”
Two days after the emails were sent, Archer checked into the Obama White House to meet with Vice President Joe Biden, Secret Service entry records show.
On April 22, 2014, the first day of Joe Biden’s high-profile visit to Ukraine as the Obama administration’s new regional liaison, Hunter Biden reported in a new email that his father had made comments urging Ukraine to expand its natural gas business during his visit to Kiev. The son suggested that he and his partner praised Brisma for comments they received in the vice president’s speech to Ukrainian lawmakers.
After the vice president’s comments were forwarded to Hunter Biden, Archer wrote him, “Wow, we need to make sure this rag-tag interim government in Ukraine understands the value of Brisma to its existence.”
Hunter Biden wrote back, “You should send it to Vadim and make it look like we are adding value.”
Vadim is apparently a reference to Vadim Pozharskyi, a Brisma executive who dealt directly with Hunter Biden and Devin Archer. Other emails made public last fall show that Pozharskyi had a brief meeting with Joe Biden, arranged by Hunter Biden.
The emails show Hunter Biden and Pozharskyi polishing a press release with Pozharskyi announcing his role on the Brisma board a month later, in mid-May 2014.
It also shows that Hunter Biden recognized the legal controversy surrounding the company and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, and planned for his team at Boies Schiller to contact U.S. officials in his father’s administration to help make Brisma key to Ukraine’s push to get rid of Russian natural gas, which Putin uses as a geopolitical weapon.
“We can actually be of real value here, developing relationships, bringing U.S. expertise to the company, providing strategic advice on political and geopolitical risk assessments,” he wrote.
“BSF can actually have direct discussions at State, Energy and NSC. If needed, they can design a media plan and arrange for legal protection and mitigation of negative press within the U.S. regarding the current leadership.”
The email also said Hunter Biden was keenly aware that lobbying on behalf of foreign companies seeking U.S. assistance could trigger the requirements of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and urged attention to his team to stay within the law.
Hunter Biden wrote that Brisma officials “need to know in no uncertain terms that we will not and cannot intervene directly with domestic policymakers and that we need to fully comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and any other U.S. law in the strictest sense.”
The emails also show that Hunter Biden hopes to use his nascent contacts in the Chinese Communist Party and other countries to potentially create energy deals for Brisma.
He wrote, “This could be the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for, if they are really smart enough to understand our long-term value. If they just want to use us until the storm passes, then we risk too much and benefit too little. We can play a priceless role in expanding their operations outside of Uk (sic, should mean Ukraine) by facilitating their U.S. partnerships and expertise – whether it’s China, Mexico, the rest of the Black Sea, Poland. “
While linking China and Ukraine, Hunter Biden also expressed some frustration that the contacts he has developed in the People’s Republic of China have not yet materialized into direct income for himself or his company, and in December 2013, his son traveled with the vice president to Beijing on Air Force Two.
Hunter Biden wrote in mid-April 2014, “We had assurances that the money from China would come first and we would build on it. Now I don’t see that happening. If they want us to go to Beijing once a month and invest outside of China, we should get paid ahead of time like every other team member who gets paid.”
Link to original article: https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/emails-obtained-fbi-detail-how-hunter-biden-landed
Comments: This article renders in detail how Hunter Biden used the influence of his father, Joe Biden, the then Vice President of the United States in charge of regional affairs in Ukraine, to obtain a position as a director of the Ukrainian gas company Brisma Holdings and make a lot of money doing so. Since Joe Biden met with the owner of Brisma alone during his visit, he could not have been unaware of his son’s ties to the company. When the company was investigated by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General Shogin for serious corruption, Joe Biden personally called the then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and threatened him with a $1 billion loan guarantee, forcing him to remove the Prosecutor General from his post. For this reason Joe Biden also bragged about it on a public talk show.
For this reason, at the end of October this year Ukrainian authorities officially listed Joe Biden as a criminal suspect. It has also become widely known that the Biden father and son have committed criminal acts of collecting black money through their cooperation with Huaxin Energy. Therefore, we are fully convinced that Joe Biden is a corrupt politician with absolutely no moral grounding. If he is allowed to be the president of the United States, it will certainly be a huge disaster.
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