Joe Biden’s Assist to Hunter’s Business
New emails suggest what Burisma really wanted from the Bidens.
WSJ Editorial Board
House investigators keep digging into the Biden family business, and this week comes new evidence of the ways Joe Biden helped his son using alias email accounts.
Internal Revenue Service agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler provided to the House Ways and Means Committee more information from their multiyear investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes and business.
The documents include an 11-page log showing a list of 327 emails that Joe Biden sent or received from 2010 to 2019 under pseudonyms that included “robinware456” and “robert.l.peters.” Mr. Biden was a big user of these shadow accounts, with the National Archives and Records Administration disclosing that it has up to 82,000 pages of emails and documents sent or received under Biden aliases while he was Vice President.
The 327 emails listed in the log are exchanges between Joe Biden and Hunter or Eric Schwerin, a former Hunter business partner who handled Biden family finances. The committee says 54 of the exchanges are between Joe Biden and Mr. Schwerin.
Five emails were exchanged within five days of Mr. Biden’s June 2014 trip to Ukraine, while another 27 were exchanged prior to his return trip to Ukraine in November 2014. Those trips coincided with Hunter’s lucrative board position at Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.
The trips preceded then Vice President’s Biden’s 2015 role in forcing the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma and its CEO, Nikolai Zlochevsky, for corruption. Another 38 emails originated from within the White House and were sent to Joe Biden aliases, with Hunter Biden copied.
The committee doesn’t know the contents of the emails, but further evidence provided to Congress raises questions about Hunter’s role at Burisma, the political access he was peddling, and Joe Biden’s knowledge of that work. Hunter’s former partner, Devon Archer, previously told Congress that “Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the [Biden] brand attached to it.”
Ways and Means also received new emails from Mr. Ziegler that are revealing about what Burisma wanted from Hunter. One email is from Vadym Pozharsky, an adviser to Burisma, to Hunter in April 2015. The Ukrainian thanked Hunter for “the opportunity to meet your father and spent (sp) some time together.”
Another Pozharsky email to Hunter (which copies Mr. Schwerin) in November 2015 asks Hunter for thoughts on a proposal for a contract for a U.S. lobbying firm, Blue Star Strategies. Mr. Pozharsky worries about the lack of “concrete, tangible results” listed in the proposal, including how the firm will improve Mr. Zlochevky’s “case.”
Mr. Pozharsky says it’s okay if the omission was to be on “the safe and cautious side,” so long as “all parties in fact understand the true purpose” of the contract. He then spells that out, saying the Blue Star work needs to include arranging a visit of “widely recognized and influential current and/or former US policy-makers to Ukraine . . . to close down for any cases/pursuits against [Zlochevsky] in Ukraine.”
An October 2016 email between a Blue Star employee and Mr. Schwerin includes the news that the Ukrainian government had ended its probe into Mr. Zlochevsky (about eight months after the Ukrainian prosecutor was fired). Mr. Schwerin congratulates the team on its “awesome work.” The Blue Star employee writes: “Thanks. U brought us in so take a victory lap.”
All of this suggests Joe Biden was fully aware that Hunter was selling the family “brand,” and that the Vice President was helping with the sale. It also raises new questions about the connection between Hunter’s job at Burisma and Joe’s work getting the Ukrainian prosecutor of Mr. Zlochevsky fired. None of it looks good.
