As the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden ramps up, “Burisma Holdings” might well become a U.S. household name. Consortium News has been on the story for nine years.
And we plan on staying on it as a possible impeachment of Joe Biden approaches. Help us to provide coverage as we learn more about what Joe Biden was really up to in Ukraine a decade ago.
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After the 2014 Coup
The U.S.-installed government in Kiev outlawed political parties, including the Communist Party, and stripped Russian as an official language. Ousted President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions was banned in several oblasts and eventually collapsed. An American citizen became finance minister and Vice President Joe Biden became Barack Obama’s virtual viceroy in Ukraine. Three months later, Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, Burisma Holdings, appointed Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors.
Videos have emerged of Biden then giving instructions to the nominal president at the time, Petro Poroshenko. By his own admission, Biden forced the resignation of Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general.
Shokin testified under oath that he was about to investigate Burisma Holdings, the company on which the vice president’s son was given a lucrative board membership just months after the U.S.-backed coup.
Biden, other U.S. officials, and the media at the time lied that Shokin was removed because he was corrupt. State Dept. memos released last year and published by Just the News actually praise Shokin for his anti-corruption work. The question of whether the leader of a foreign nation has the right to remove another country’s prosecutor was buried. With the emergence of Hunter Biden’s laptop, more lies have surfaced, such as that Joe Biden was never involved at all with Hunter’s business dealings.
Here are just a few of the many articles we’ve published starting in September 2014, seven months after the coup, when our founding editor, Bob Parry, first introduced readers to the Burisma story.
Sept. 24, 2014
From the article: “Further supporting the ‘natural gas motive’ is the fact that it was Vice President Joe Biden who demanded that President Yanukovych pull back his police on Feb. 21, a move that opened the way for the neo-Nazi militias and the U.S.-backed coup. Then, just three months later, Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, Burisma Holdings, appointed Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors.”
Sept. 26, 2019
The Untold Story of the Trump-Ukraine ‘Scandal’: The Routine Corruption of US Foreign Policy
From the story:“That’s the biggest crime in this story that isn’t being told. The illegal overthrow of a sovereign government. As booty from the coup, the sitting vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, soon got a seat on the board of Ukraine’s biggest gas producer, Burisma Holdings. This can only be seen as a transparently neocolonial maneuver to take over a country and install one’s own people.”
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Oct. 8, 2019
From the story: Can you imagine if the Trump administration finally succeeded in overthrowing the Venezuelan government and a couple of months later Vice President Mike Pence’s son (who wasn’t kicked out of the Navy for drug use) lands a spot on the board of a privatized Venezuelan national oil company?
That is exactly what happened with Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine.
And then imagine that the U.S.-installed government of Juan Guaidó begins an investigation into corruption at the oil company and wants to question Pence’s son. So Pence flies to Caracas and tells Guaidó he won’t get a $1 billion U.S. credit line until the prosecutor is fired. Six hours later the prosecutor begins cleaning out his desk and Pence later brags about it in an open forum at the Council on Foreign Relations.
That is exactly what Biden did in Ukraine.
The fired Venezuelan prosecutor then gives an affidavit under oath that Pence had him fired because he was investigating his son’s company and that the U.S. had taken over the country’s prosecutor’s office.
That is exactly what the Ukrainian prosecutor testified.
Nov.12, 2019
From the story: The political theatrics raise several questions. For starters, will Joe Biden be investigated for mounting evidence of corruption? And why is the corporate media turning the C.I.A. “whistleblower” into a phantom in plain sight?
July 31, 2023
From the story: Seven years ago, the DNC email leak set Russiagate in motion. Now comes FD–1023, an F.B.I. document exposing Biden making fully corrupt use of Washington’s leverage in post-coup Ukraine.
Sept. 19, 2023
From the story: In the wake of Zelensky’s wildly provocative statements, it is time to question whether the U.S. president has a personal interest in prolonging the war in Ukraine.
* *. *
Here is a taste of what is on tap: the grilling by Republicans of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland last week on the Hunter Biden investigation, about which Amanda Devine of The New York Post wrote:
“[Garland] wants us to applaud his pathological incuriosity about the corruption of [Special Counsel xx ] Weiss’ probe, as exposed by the two valiant IRS whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler. The sort of professional, nonpartisan public servants whom Garland professes to support, they are the heroes of this sordid tale.
They blew up their careers to testify about the slow-walking, the kid-glove treatment available to no other American, the tip-offs about search warrants, the constraints on investigators, the no-go zones anywhere near the Big Guy, the refusal of geolocation searches to determine whether Joe really was in the room, as Hunter claimed, in his shakedown WhatsApp to a Chinese benefactor, the burying of incriminating evidence such as the FD-1023 FBI source report alleging Hunter and Joe each took a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian oligarch, and of course, Hunter’s infamous laptop, which the FBI had authenticated and seized in December 2019, but which remained off-limits to the IRS investigators.”
Consortium News will provide in depth coverage of the expected impeachment proceedings, so please:
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I made some excellent Cliff Notes for this event, that I largely extracted from the les-crises.fr videos posted on Consortium in 2020.
But I guess you have word limit, it’s 7378 words.
I’ll send it by email, feel free to publish it.
There’s no doubt that Joe Biden is as corrupt as any member of Congress or SCOTUS.
But let’s assume that all of Robert Parry’s & Patrick Lawrence’s accounts are true — which, I believe, they are.
Where is the crime? Which U.S. statutes were violated? And how can these crimes, if any, be prosecuted without evidence?
Given the extent of legalized bribery in the U.S., I would think that Biden would have easy access to all the legally-sourced money that he wants, without taking “hot” money from whatever Hunter was doing. Why take that risk?
I don’t think Joe Biden was doing anything with Hunter for his own financial gain; I think he just wanted Hunter to stay out of trouble & get paid outrageous sums of $$ for doing nothing so he wouldn’t be needing $$ from Dad.
I’m open to seeing whatever evidence there might be about illegal payments that find their way to Joe, but absent any evidence of illegal payments, I think that this is a “nothing burger.”
Hard to even comment on the duplicity involved which makes a mockery of United States democracy, the United States justice system and the federal bureaucracy, to say nothing of the Democratic Party, But perhaps the strongest criticism should be of the American voter who lacks the courage of his or her convictions permitting him or herself to be so easily and so consistently manipulated.
Agree with your comment but will add that in addition ” to lacking the courage of his or her convictions ” American voters also lack the intelligence to make informed decisions. The product coming out of our large city public high schools for 20 years has begun to take its toll on life in America. And we haven’t reached bottom so who knows who is going to reach the White House in coming years. An old sage once remarked that every person elected to the US Senate automatically considers himself/herself a potential Presidential or at least V.P. candidate.
Anyone looking at a current roster of US Senators should find that to be a scary thought. They must all be thinking that if Joe Biden can make it why not me.
I agree with everything Mr. Mahe wrote and most of what you wrote Robert. At present our House, Senate and President are overall, irredeemably corrupt. We need wholesale changes before the corruption destroys our Republic. There are a few who are decent and even patriotic and some potential Presidential material. Josh Hawley stands out. Rand Paul is rational and sensible. Kirsten Sinema is highly intelligent, a master of policy and honestly works hard. Ron Johnson is reliable. J.D. Vance is impressive. In the House, James Comer has shown his courage and competence in taking on the deep state. Our 2024 election is make or break.
You cannot really think I will believe this. Corruption only occurs in Russia (and Africa), stealing secrets is carried out by only the Chinese. These are at the core of the “Rules Based Order”. The USA and Great Britain are the light of the world.
This ilk knows no shame.
I’ve been working on making some Cliff Notes for this scandal because it’s rather complicated.
I extracted most of this info from the fantastic les-crises.fr videos.
Let me know if I got anything wrong here.
——————————
While Biden is Vice President his administration instigated a coup to replace Yanukovych with arguably the most corrupt replacement possible Poroshenko.
– Nuland in a leaked bugged phone call made it explicitly clear that we were involved. Plus it’s business as usual for the U.S., who actively works through the CIA and embassies in every country to impose our its on local politics. This is done with lots of money, bribery, blackmail and dirty tricks, with no accountability. Countries where we do not have the leadership firmly in our pocket are always priorities. A strategic country like Ukraine would always be an ongoing priority.
But president Yanukovych was not a Russia-phobe and not our puppet, so there would have been an active ongoing campaign to replace him. Nuland unwittingly leaked that it cost us some $5 billion to make it happen. The corporate media has worked hard to throw up a smoke screen about this event.
Poroshenko was hand picked to replace Yanukovych, because he is easily corruptible and willing to be antagonistic with Russia.
Poroshenko immediately started to leverage his position of power to turn up the heat on several corrupt businesses, not to stop corruption, but to force corrupt companies to bribe him to leave them alone.
Against Burisma he blocked lucrative licenses and also sent the prosecutor’s office afte them.
Burisma started paying Poroshenko $1 million per month to unblock the licenses.
But it didn’t stop the prosecutor’s office, led by Victor Shokin, which they thought was really unfair.
So Zlochevsky – CEO of Burisma decided to try to bribe influence peddler Hunter Biden to help them fix this problem.
The way they paid Hunter was to hire him to their board, in spite of him demonstrably having zero experience in the industry. They paid him $1 million dollars “salary” for serving on the board for one year.
In that time Shokin went as far as to freeze millions of dollars in Burisma assets and that was the last straw for Zlochevsky.
Hunter’s job was to use his influence through his father to fix their problems using politics, and with Shokin now freezing assets they demanded action.
Hunter reassured them by showing his associates that he can get his father the vice president on the phone at any time and even have him come by in person to demonstrate to his business associates that Hunter really is tight enough with the vice president to make things happen. They know better than to blatantly talk about work or bribes in such situations, it’s just an appearance to impress upon Burisma execs that indeed Hunter has his father close at hand, so keep paying and the problems will be fixed. With the help of Joe in this way, Hunter kept Burisma’s faith that he does have the connections to get something done and to earn the $1 million dollars.
And Hunter delivered.
Very soon after the assets were frozen, Joe Biden shows up in Ukraine and demands they fire Shokin *immediately* (he gave them six hours), or they can’t have this $1 billion dollars of U.S. taxpayer money, quid pro quo.
He informs them that Obama has agreed to back him on this and he later brags about that in interviews. There’s no way he could get away with lying about that in public interviews, Obama would have to call him on it for abuse of power as VP, if Biden were speaking for Obama on something as big as that without his consent. So there can be little doubt Obama was in on this. I don’t think Obama was getting paid, it was probably just professional courtesy between morally bankrupt bedfellows. Conceivably, Biden may have tried to tell Obama that Shokin needed to go because he was corrupt. But it’s hard to believe Obama is that naive.
Biden then brags with tremendous satisfaction about getting Shokin fired by threatening to withhold $1 billion and he declares “they replaced him with somebody solid”.
Shokin indeed was fired and replaced by a guy named Lutsenko, the most unqualified and corrupt replacement possible who had actually done hard time himself in prison for the exact kind of corruption he was supposed to now be prosecuting.
Lutsenko has zero experience in law or as a prosecutor. It made no sense at all for him to be named chief prosecutor.
Lutsenko has Burisma pay pack a token few million of the $23 million they had obtained corruptly, then says they’re absolved of all crimes, he unfroze their assets and set them free to go.
So after 3 months they closed a very complex criminal investigation that had been going on for years and was very much active under Shokin.
Burisma was then free to continue its enterprise of corruptly obtaining gas licenses through bribes and making millions of dollars. And Biden’s sudden and intense interest in corruption in Ukraine returned back to baseline.
Bribing the Bidens to get Shokin fired cost Burisma at least $1 million and possibly more than $10 million – they are still trying to track the money through more than 20 shell companies the Bidens shuffled it through. But it paid off for them in spades. They have to be considered very successful bribes.
Everything here is supported by reams of evidence, save one thing and that’s proof of an actual direct payment to Joe himself. The IRS whistleblowers know that some $17 million in payments went to the Biden family and that things were shuffled around through an array of some 20 shell companies to make it very hard to trace. But nobody can explain what Hunter did to earn all this money.
There are more than enough undeniable facts of this case to make it absurd for anybody to claim all adds up to nothing.
FACT: Hunter Biden was paid $1 million by Burisma for no apparent reason and FACT: Joe Biden did withhold $1 billion to Ukraine until Shokin was fired. That should be enough right there for anybody to be very concerned.
The go-to argument of those who want to deny all this is that Shokin was corrupt and was not actually going after Burisma and Biden had him replaced by somebody better who did go after them. The media repeat this ad nauseum without evidence and in fact in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
But that bogus argument has a lot of traction with the democrats because they desperately want to believe it.
But there’s overwhelming evidence.
These guys from France (who are not on the Right by any means) have compiled hours of powerful evidence in four videos.
hxxps://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/13/new-documentary-sheds-light-on-ukrainegate/
hxxps://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/20/part-two-of-ukrainegate-inconvenient-facts/
hxxps://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/29/part-three-of-ukrainegate-inconvenient-facts/
hxxps://consortiumnews.com/2020/02/17/part-four-of-ukrainegate-inconvenient-facts/
The Washington Post has to be the most shameless of them all in terms of denying reality and being indignant about it.
There’s no way of course that the current president Zelensky does not have evidence of Biden’s corruption in Ukraine.
That’s what they impeached Trump for, for simply inquiring about this with Zelensky.
And now we see Biden bending over backwards to give Zelensky everything he wants to drag us into WWIII.
Meanwhile your average democrat voter is so apathetic since Biden took office that all they have picked up about politics over the last three years is that Roe V. Wade was overturned and Trump has been indicted.
In the eyes of most democrats Biden only has one job and that’s to not be Trump.
They’ll wake back up next year when they’re told to get busy pimping for Biden’s next term of turning the world into a burning ember.
Turning a blind eye on a bit of corruption from Biden is justified because he beat Trump.
We don’t care if the U.S. president is a mass murderer kleptomaniac terrorist (which they both are) as long as he has good social etiquette in polite company and he’s pro-choice. What you do to foreigners, particularly peasants in the third world, has been all but completely factored out of our political consciousness.
But all democrat senators and congressmen vote are international terrorists. For example the unanimous support of these so-called “emergency measures” speaks volumes:
hxxps://thegrayzone.com/2023/07/20/resolutions-emergency-iraq-syria-libya-yemen/
And yet the Establishment is entrenched and does not blink at Corruption. Pay-to-play and buying access to our politicians is now standard operating procedure for lobbyists and foreign “allies”.
Ukraine has not been independent and sovereign since the CIA-backed Orange Revolution Coup in 2005. Ukraine has been an American colony since then with VP Biden running affairs there since 2009 (no doubt proclaiming Bandera, Hero of Ukraine through Yushchenko, an American-trained banker married to an American State Dept/ CIA official. Fascism/ Nationalism became acceptable under Biden). While Yanukovych was not as malleable a US Puppet as Yushchenko, Poroshenko, and Zelensky, he was still a Puppet: “it was Vice President Joe Biden who demanded that President Yanukovych pull back his police on Feb. 21, a move that opened the way for the neo-Nazi militias and the U.S.-backed coup” in 2014; Yanukovych essentially cut his own throat in response to Biden’s demand. While painted as corrupt Putin Puppets, Yanukovych and Shokin appear more concerned with the welfare of Ukrainians than Yushchenko, Poroshenko and Zelensky, who were Biden’s minions.
Attorney General Merrick Garland does not testify but lie
From the article:
“From the story: Can you imagine if the Trump administration finally succeeded in overthrowing the Venezuelan government and a couple of months later Vice President Mike Pence’s son (who wasn’t kicked out of the Navy for drug use) lands a spot on the board of a privatized Venezuelan national oil company? ”
“That is exactly what happened with Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine.”
Paraphrasing from the mouth of biden:
“Son of a bitch”
The Democrats always project and preemptively accuse their opposition of the crimes they actually commit. That way when the truth comes out, many people are totally confused and struggle to sort out what really happened. They did it with the Russia hoax and that ran for years until it was revealed that Hillary Clinton created the whole massive lie. Some people still cling to the belief that it happened. Those people are demoralized. As you observed, Pelosi impeached Trump over flimsy Ukraine charges to cover up the Biden’s actual corruption in Ukraine.
Hillary, Pelosi and Biden are pure evil. The deep state and activist judges and juries protect them while savaging their opposition. The best thing that can be said about them is that they will all be dead and gone in another 15-20 years. Each of them should already be incarcerated for various felonies. They fed Menendez to the wolves to feign that the DOJ and FBI are not entirely corrupt. But Pelosi, Hillary and Biden are far more corrupt than Menendez and smugly believe they can fool all of the people, all of the time.
We will find out if the Psychological Operations are still working on a majority of voters in November 2024. It could still go either way. What we do know now is that the DNC is in trouble with Biden as the nominee and they know it too. There is no doubt they are already hatching a plot to dump Biden somehow. But Biden is one of them and won’t go quietly. He knows where their bodies are buried just like they know where his are. Biden is also increasingly desperate as his son Hunter’s influence peddling is unraveling by the day. Hunter is so desperate now that he is trying to intimidate the witnesses to his crimes with frivolous accusations and lawsuits. Joe Biden’s putrid performance as President is apparent to all.