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    Burisma QA

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    JohnSolomon
    Questions and answers drafted in June 2016 by the State Department for incoming Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, including what to say about Hunter Biden's role at Burisma Holdings.

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    Burisma QA

    Uploaded by

    JohnSolomon
    7K views2 pages
    Questions and answers drafted in June 2016 by the State Department for incoming Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, including what to say about Hunter Biden's role at Burisma Holdings.

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    © © All Rights Reserved

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    Questions and answers drafted in June 2016 by the State Department for incoming Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, including what to say about Hunter Biden's role at Burisma Holdings.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    7K views2 pages

    Burisma QA

    Uploaded by

    JohnSolomon
    Questions and answers drafted in June 2016 by the State Department for incoming Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, including what to say about Hunter Biden's role at Burisma Holdings.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 2

    In midst of 2016 election, State Department saw Burisma as Joe Biden’s issue, memos show

    By John Solomon

    In recent interviews, Joe Biden has distanced himself from his son’s work at a Ukrainian gas
    company that was under investigation during the Obama years, with the former vice president
    suggesting he didn’t even know Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings.

    There is plenty of evidence that conflicts with the former vice president’s account, including
    Hunter Biden’s own story that he discussed the company once with his famous father.

    There also was a December 2015 New York Times story that raised the question of whether
    Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma posed a conflict of interest for the vice president, especially
    when Joe Biden was leading the fight against Ukrainian corruption while Hunter Biden’s firm
    was under investigation by Ukrainian prosecutors..

    But whatever the Biden family recollections, the Obama State Department clearly saw the
    Burisma Holdings investigation in the midst of the 2016 presidential election as a Joe Biden
    issue.

    Memos newly released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Southeastern
    Legal Foundation detail how State officials in June 2016 worked to prepare the new U.S.
    ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, to handle a question about Burisma.

    In multiple drafts of a question-and-answer memo prepared for Yovanovitch’s Senate


    confirmation hearing, the department’s Ukraine experts urged the incoming ambassador to
    refer all “Burisma and Hunter Biden” questions to Biden’s VP office.

    “Do you have any comment on Hunter Biden, the Vice President’s son, serving on the board of
    Burisma, a major Ukrainian Gas Company?,” the draft Q&A asked.

    The recommended answer for Yovanovitch was: “For questions on Hunter Biden’s role on
    Burisma, I would refer you to Vice President Biden’s office.”

    The Q&A is consistent with other information flowing out of State. As I reported yesterday,
    when a Burisma representative contacted State in February to ask for the department’s help in
    quashing the corruption allegations, Hunter Biden’s role on the company’s board was
    prominently cited.

    And a senior State Department official who testified recently in the impeachment proceedings
    reportedly told lawmakers he tried to warn the vice president’s office that Burisma posed a
    conflict for Joe Biden.
    There are no laws that would have prevented Hunter Biden from joining Burisma even as his
    father oversaw Ukraine policy for the President Obama. And the corruption investigations
    launched in 2014 by British and Ukraine authorities involving Burisma and its owner Mykola
    Zlocvhevsky involved activities that pre-dated Hunter Biden’s arrival on the board.

    The real public interest question involves Joe Biden. Federal ethics rules require government
    officials to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, and ethics experts I talked with say the
    vice president should have recused himself from issues affecting Burisma.

    That became poignantly public when Biden leveraged the threat of canceling $1 billion in U.S.
    aid in March 2016 to get Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who just happened to oversee the
    Burisma probe.

    There are more memos and documents to be released in the coming months under the FOIA
    lawsuit I filed with the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

    But one thing is already clear: long before President Trump or his attorney Rudy Giuliani tried to
    make political hay out of the Burisma issue, career State officials already saw it as an issue for
    Joe Biden.

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