Marie Yovanovich (Credit: Greg Nash/The Hill)
“Twenty-two days before President Obama left office, the U.S. ambassador to Kiev wrote top officials in Washington that she feared Burisma Holdings had made a second bribe to Ukrainian officials around the time a corruption probe against Hunter Biden’s natural gas employer was closed before Donald Trump took office.
The concerns are detailed in new memos belatedly released to Just the News under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department. The suit was brought on behalf of the news organization by the public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.
Then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s concerns were first raised in a Ukrainian news story about a Russian-backed fugitive lawmaker in Ukraine, who alleged Burisma had dumped low-priced natural gas into the market for officials near Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to buy low and sell high, making a bribe disguised as a profit.
“There are accusations that Burisma allegedly had a subsidiary dump natural gas as a way to pay bribes,” Yovanovitch wrote Nuland on Dec. 29, 2016, noting the story “mentions that Hunter Biden and former Polish President Kwasniewski are on the Burisma Board.”
The alert was the second in two years in which the embassy alleged Burisma had paid a bribe while Vice President Joe Biden’s son served on its board. (Read more: JusttheNews, 10/01/2020) (Archive)