The Impeachment (of Pres. Trump) Testimony’s Revelations about Biden and Burisma
By Jim Geraghty
November 19, 2019 9:54 AM
Making the click-through worthwhile: What George Kent and Marie Yovanovitch said about Burisma and the Bidens. George Kent is the career diplomat who has served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs since September 2018.
A section of the testimony of Kent that has received almost no public scrutiny and discussion:
REPUBLICAN COUNSEL STEVE CASTOR: And the — the company Burisma, its — its leader, [Mykola Vladislavovich] Zlochevsky, he has a — a little bit of a storied history of corruption, doesn’t he?
KENT: Mr. Zlochevsky was minister of energy from 2010 to 2012 under the pro-Russian government, and he used his regulatory authority to award gas exploration licenses to companies that he himself controlled. That would be considered an act of corruption in my view, yes.
CASTOR: Certainly self-dealing.
KENT: Certainly self-dealing and self-enriching.
CASTOR: And — and how did the Ukrainian government ultimately pursue that?
KENT: In the spring of 2014, the Ukrainian government, the new government after the Revolution of Dignity, turned to partners, particularly the U.S. and the U.K., to try to recover tens of billions of dollars of stolen assets. The first case that we tried to recover that money came from Mr. Zlochevsky. Serious Crimes Office in the U.K. had already opened up an investigation. They worked with us and the Ukrainian authorities to develop more information. The — the $23 million was frozen until somebody in the General Prosecutors Office of Ukraine shut the case, issued a letter to his lawyer and that money went ‘poof.’
CASTOR: So essentially paid a bribe to make the case go away.
KENT: That is our strong assumption, yes, sir.
CASTOR: OK. Now, at any point in time has — has any — anyone in the Ukrainian government tried to reinvestigate that, or did that — did those crimes just go unpunished, and was he free to go?
KENT: Mr. Zlochevsky spent time, as far as I understand, in — in Moscow and Monaco after he fled Ukraine. We continue to raise, as a point of order, that because U.S. taxpayer dollars had been used to try to recover frozen assets, that we have a fiduciary responsibility, and we continue to press Ukrainian officials to answer for why alleged corrupt prosecutors had closed a case, and we have ’til now not gotten a satisfactory answer. So to summarize, we thought that Mykola Zlochevsky had stolen money. We thought a prosecutor had taken a bribe to shut the case, and those were our main concerns.
CASTOR: And are you in favor of that matter being fully investigated and prosecuted?
KENT: I think, since U.S. taxpayer dollars were wasted, I would love to see the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office find who the corrupt prosecutor was that took the bribe and how much that was paid, and that’s what I said to the deputy prosecutor general on February 3, 2015.
CASTOR: But over the years it’s been involved in — in a number of questionable dealings, correct?
KENT: I would say that it’s the largest private gas producer in the country, and its business reputation is mixed.
CASTOR: OK. Now, this — the — the bribe was paid in what year?
KENT: To the best of my knowledge, the case against Zlochevsky, the former minister, was shut down December of 2014.
Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma in April 2014. Joe Biden visited Ukraine three times in 2014: April 21-22; June 6; Nov. 20-21. The meeting that Biden famously discussed at the Council on Foreign Relations was actually from December 2015.
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/theres-evidence-hunter-bidens-role-with-burisma-influenced-obamas-ukraine-policy/