Robert Hur report – Appendix A, page 350 at 100% zoom setting)
According to the appendices listing the documents recovered in the Justice Department investigation into Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, the president retained talking points and a telephone call transcript with the Ukrainian prime minister from a key period in Hunter Biden’s Burisma Holdings employment.
One appendix also lists a classified briefing on U.S. Energy Assistance to Ukraine, from September 2014, shortly after Hunter Biden had joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company.
These are the latest revelations from Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on his investigation into potentially mishandling of classified documents by President Biden. Though Hur ultimately declined to bring charges, the report has revealed new anecdotes about Biden’s mental acuity and showed that he willfully retained and shared classified documents.
In a folder entitled “VP Personal” DOJ investigators found two documents relating to a December 11, 2015 call between then-Vice President Biden and then Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
“A Telephone Call Sheet setting forth the purpose of and talking points for a call with Ukrainian Prime Minister Yatsenyuk,” the summary of the first document reads.
“There is a handwritten note addressed to Mr. Biden’s executive assistant: ‘Get copy of this conversation from Sit Rm for my Records please’ that is signed ‘Joe.’,” the summary continues.
The second document is the full transcript documenting this call with the prime minister.
In another location, the investigators found a memo entitled “U.S. Energy Assistance to Ukraine,” dated to September 2014, just months after Hunter Biden formally joined the board of Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company.
December 2015 was an important period for both Vice President Biden and his son Hunter regarding Ukraine.
Last year, Just the News uncovered new documents that showed that in late 2015, Joe Biden changed official U.S. policy by linking a $1 billion loan guarantee to the Ukrainian government with a requirement to fire Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma at the time.
In October, a Ukraine task force made up of State, Treasury and Justice Department officials concluded that Ukraine had made “sufficient progress” on its anticorruption and economic reforms to justify the loan guarantee.
Internal memos for then-Vice President Biden’s upcoming trip to Ukraine dated Nov. 22, 2015 urged the vice president to offer the $1 billion loan guarantee during his trip, citing Kyiv’s progress. Yet, by the time Biden arrived in Kyiv on Dec. 8, 2015, he had decided to link the loan guarantee to Shokin’s ouster. (Read more: Just the News, 2/09/2024) (Archive)
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Appendix A of the report provided a table summary of the documents recovered. Many of the top-secret and classified documents concerned Ukraine during the time frame when Hunter Biden acted as an intermediary between Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, and the vice president. Recall that Hunter’s business partner, Devon Archer, told the House Oversight Committee that in early March 2014, he met Zlochevsky while in Moscow. And soon after, he and Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board, receiving $83,000 per month.
The following month, Hunter Biden sent Archer an email dated April 13, 2014 — one week before Joe Biden would travel to Ukraine and meet then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Referring to “my guys upcoming travels,” Hunter then elaborated on “22 points about Ukraine’s political situation, with detailed information about the upcoming election and predicting an escalation of Russia’s ‘destabilization campaign, which could lead to a full-scale takeover of the eastern region, most critically Donetsk,’” according to the New York Post.
Among the material recovered from President Biden’s unauthorized storage locales were several top-secret and otherwise classified or confidential documents discussing Ukraine. One undated document discussed issues related to Russian aggression toward Ukraine. Another, dated Sept. 17, 2014, consisted of a “Memorandum for the Vice President from staff members, with subject ‘U.S. Energy Assistance to Ukraine.’” Also dated Sept. 17, 2014, was an “event memo” from a vice-presidential national security staffer, titled, “Lunch with Ukrainian President Poroshenko,” which was scheduled for the following day.
The overlap between Joe Biden’s Ukraine-related work and Hunter Biden’s Burisma profiteering became more pronounced in 2015. On Dec. 2, 2015, the lobbying firm Blue Star Group, which Hunter Biden had arranged to work with Burisma, wrote to Burisma that it had “participated in a conference call today with senior Obama Administration officials ahead of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine next week.” The memorandum provided a summary of the conference call, telling Burisma that “Michael Carpenter, Vice President Biden’s Special Advisor for Europe and Russia, and Dr. Colin Kahl, the Vice President’s National Security Advisor, presented the agenda for the trip and answered questions about current U.S. policy toward Ukraine.”