On a day when American newsrooms were in panic that their careful packaging of the Kamala Harris campaign was under assault by the Trump-Musk conversation on X, which may have attracted as many as a billion views, the New York Times let an explosive story slip onto its front pages.
"Hunter Biden Sought State Department Help for Ukrainian Company," the headline screamed. The subheadline was even more damaging:
After President Biden dropped his re-election bid, his administration released records showing that while he was vice president, his son solicited U.S. government assistance.
The Times has not been kind to Biden in recent weeks. It was the first major media outlet to publicly suggest that Biden should drop out of the race after the Atlanta debate. It also teamed up with Hollywood star and fundraiser George Clooney on an op-ed with the same message. Whether this story was to denigrate Biden further and turn a new leaf on Kamala Harris will never be known. However, the Times' acknowledgment that the information was always available and the administration held it from public view until Biden dropped his re-election bid was an astonishing rebuke.
The background to the Times story goes back to when Hunter Biden served on the Ukrainian energy company Burisma board from 2014 through 2019, earning $50,000 - $75,000 a month as a director. Hunter's role on the board was to enforce "governance and transparency," although he had no prior experience in this area, had never worked in Ukraine, and had little knowledge of the energy industry. For the first two years of his directorship, his tenure conveniently coincided with Joe Biden's position as Vice President and President Obama's point man on Ukraine.
Burisma was owned by a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky. British authorities had seized his assets, totaling $23 million, in London just a few weeks before Hunter assumed his role. To most observers, it was evident that the company board was trying to gain influence by getting Biden to pressure the Ukrainian government to go easy on Burisma.
Indeed, in 2016, Joe Biden publicly pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, the country's Prosecutor General, whose office was investigating Burisma, among other institutions. Biden recalled in a 2018 event at the Council on Foreign Relations:
I was supposed to announce in Kyiv that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. I got the commitment that they would take action against the state prosecutor.....You are not getting the billion dollars. I'm leaving in six hours. The prosecutor is not fired; you are not getting the money. Son of a bitch, he got fired.
Biden was also dismissive of internal State Department concerns that Hunter's role in Burisma and the implied influence peddling on the Biden family name would hurt the reputation of the United States government. According to a United States Senate report, George Kent, the former Acting Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, raised concerns to officials in Vice President Joe Biden's office in early 2015 about the perception of a conflict of interest regarding Hunter's role on Burisma's board. In September 2016, he emphasized in an email to his colleagues, "Furthermore, the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine." Biden and his inner circle ignored these concerns.
Fast-forward to yesterday and the Times revealed that Hunter was active in influence peddling after all: "Hunter Biden sought assistance from the U.S. government for a potentially lucrative energy project in Italy while his father was vice president...Hunter wrote at least one letter to the U.S. ambassador to Italy in 2016 seeking assistance for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where he was a board member." The Times story confirmed that the Biden administration had withheld this truth from the public for years.
Perhaps the Times felt guilty tarnishing the Biden family so publicly, for it took pains to explain how there was nothing fundamentally conspiratorial about it. The White House said the President was unaware that Hunter had sought the U.S. embassy's help in Italy when he was vice president. Hunter Biden has not been charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The State Department is notoriously slow when it comes to releasing public records. Career public servants, not political appointees, oversaw the records release process. The information was only revealed after the Times filed a Freedom of Information request. Each excuse was meant to mask the death blow that the Times has dealt the Biden family.
It is a victory lap for us. The Biden family has shown they will go to any length to protect themselves, including deliberately withholding information from the public that could be detrimental to Biden or Hunter. President Biden has been extraordinarily protective of Hunter, defending him repeatedly, although the evidence pointed to questionable behavior. In a 2019 interview with ABC News, Biden asserted that Hunter's work with Burisma was above board and that there was no evidence of wrongdoing. During a 2020 presidential debate, Biden stated he had never discussed his son's business with him and criticized the allegations against Hunter as a political attack. Biden even said that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, an assertion we know today is false.
Now, even the Times is revealing that Hunter used his perch on Burisma's board to ask American officials (when Biden was vice president) for formal U.S. government help through a Commerce Department program. The request was for American officials to arrange an introduction between Burisma and the president of the Tuscany region of Italy, where Burisma was pursuing a geothermal project. It was an extraordinary case of using family connections to leverage taxpayer resources for personal gain.
President Trump was right to ask Zelenskyy to investigate Biden's family connections and dealings in Ukraine. Instead, Adam Schiff and Alexander Vindman helped impeach Trump and kick start a cycle of Congressional action against him, leading to Trump's second impeachment and the 18-month-long partisan J6 Committee proceedings.
