Miranda Devine: Joe Biden and son Hunter's Burisma connection – voters have a right to know the truth

Joe Biden repeatedly has denied knowing anything about son Hunter’s lucrative work on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

“Hunter Biden is a private citizen and a lawyer. The former vice president does not endorse any particular company and has no involvement with this company,” a spokeswoman for Joe Biden said in a December 2015 statement to the New York Times.

Biden has stonewalled on the topic ever since.

“I’ve never discussed my business or their business, my sons’ or daughter’s. And I’ve never discussed them because they know where I have to do my job and that’s it, and they have to make their own judgments,” he told the “CBS Evening News” last October.

GUTFELD ON THE GROWING SCANDAL ENGULFING HUNTER BIDEN

And yet, an email obtained by The Post shows a senior Burisma executive thanking Hunter for the opportunity to meet Joe Biden just 12 months after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” wrote top Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi in the April 17, 2015, email.

So, far from having “no involvement” with Burisma, Joe Biden met with one of the company’s most senior operatives — at his son’s behest — while serving as vice president.

Less than eight months after that meeting, Joe flew to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, in December 2015, and strong-armed the Ukrainian government into firing its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma for alleged corruption.

We know about Joe Biden’s role in ousting Shokin because he boasted about it in a 2018 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. There, he disclosed that he had threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees for Ukraine unless Shokin was sacked.

“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired,” Joe asserted.

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The bombshell email, discovered on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop computer, calls into question Joe Biden’s honesty in every denial he has made about his son’s controversial business dealings in countries where his father wielded power.

It raises questions about why Hunter, with zero experience in energy policy or Ukrainian affairs, but with a history of serious and chronic drug abuse, would have been paid so handsomely by an energy firm for the five years he served on its board.

The obvious implication is that Hunter was paid to buy influence with his father.

And, in fact, another email obtained by The Post reinforces that suspicion.

On May 12, 2014, just a few weeks after Hunter joined Burisma’s board, Pozharskyi wrote to him, “We urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message/signal, etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions” against Burisma.

Three months after Joe Biden’s 2015 visit to Kiev, Shokin was forced out of office, and nine months later, all legal proceedings against Burisma were dropped.

The circumstantial evidence that Burisma paid Hunter to influence his father, and, further, that the investment paid off for Burisma, demands answers.

It is up to Joe Biden to demonstrate that there was no conflict of interest in his son’s business dealings.

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It is a joke for Biden to dismiss reasonable concerns about the perception of a conflict of interest. It damages America’s international reputation and calls into question his own judgment.

American voters deserve to know.

This column first appeared in the New York Post. 

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