By Steven Richards and John Solomon
Published: June 2, 2024 10:41pm
Updated: June 3, 2024 1:45am
Hunter Biden helped the U.S. law firm that employed him secure a lucrative retainer with Burisma Holdings a decade ago, and its lawyers proceeded to draft a 58-page plan to try to extricate the controversial energy company from an ongoing criminal investigation in Ukraine that relied heavily on trying to influence his father’s administration in Washington, according to evidence gathered by the FBI.
The “legal defense plan” memo by Boies Schiller & Flexner, obtained by Just the News, was part of a collection of 3.39 million pages of evidence that federal agents seized during the 2016 election as part of a securities fraud investigation that targeted some of Hunter Biden’s business partners. Those records are now in the hands of Congress.
The June 2014 document was not on the Hunter Biden laptop that the FBI seized in 2019, but was in the possession of Hunter Biden’s closest business associate, Devon Archer, who is now cooperating with the House GOP impeachment probe of President Joe Biden.
It provides the most direct and detailed window into how Hunter Biden, his business partners and his fellow lawyers at the Boies Schiller & Flexner law firm intended to build pressure in Washington – from the State Department to Congress – to get Ukrainians to drop their criminal pursuit of Burisma after Hunter Biden and Archer were hired to its board of directors.
At the time, Joe Biden was the sitting vice president and was put in charge by President Barack Obama of US-Ukraine policy.
The memo identified several targets that the Burisma legal campaign hoped to contact in Washington, including Amos Hochstein, a longtime adviser to Joe Biden when he was vice president. Hochstein continues to work for Biden as president.
A major goal of the plan, the memo stated, was to “meet with the U.S. officials in Washington, DC who are leading U.S. policy related to Ukraine to brief them on who Burisma is, its significance to the future of Ukraine, and the Investigation in order to seek their advice and assistance; focus on why a legal challenge and/or a taking of Burisma's licenses is detrimental to both U.S. and Ukrainian national interests.”
At the time, the Obama-Biden State Department deemed Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, to be corrupt and suspected the company may have paid bribes, according to testimony during President Donald Trump’s 2019 impeachment and documents later released by the federal government to Just the News under open records laws.
The memo laid out detailed strategies for trying to change that narrative and it clearly laid out the legal risk that Burisma faced at the moment it added Hunter Biden to its board, paying him millions from 2014 to 2017.
“Burisma has been advised that it is the subject of a criminal investigation being conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine and, upon information and belief, the investigation is politically motivated (the “Investigation),” the draft memo reads.
That single declaration in the memo has caught congressional investigators attention in part because Democrats have repeatedly claimed the Ukrainian energy company—which employed Hunter Biden as a board member—was not under scrutiny when then-Vice President Joe Biden sought the firing of the country’s lead prosecutor in 2015, and linked that demand to a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee for the struggling post-revolution government in Kyiv.
But Hunter Biden had by then received direct information on the status of the criminal investigation from top Burisma executives. In a May 12, 2014 email, for instance, Hunter Biden was told by a Burisma executive that the evidence of the ongoing criminal probe included "official letters.”
“In that letters it’s stated that pretrial proceedings started following art. 191 part 5 of the Criminal Code -'Misappropriation, embezzlement or conversion or property by malversation.' Full text is attached for your information,” the email read.
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/hunter-bidens-law-firm-secretly-laid-out-58-page-plan-help-burisma