Burisma / Hunter Biden's laptop
Viktor Shokin was the Prosecutor General of Ukraine from February 2015 until March 2016. His tenure was controversial and he was seen by many in Ukraine and in the international community as failing to adequately address corruption in the country. In September 2015, Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Kyiv, took an unusual step. He tweeted - albeit in a convoluted, diplomatic manner - his demand for Shokin's dismissal. But Poroshenko was holding on to Shokin, a man who had been accused of leading an extremely corrupt state apparatus.
The prosecutor general himself, Viktor Shokin, served at the behest of President Petro Poroshenko. Since he was appointed as prosecutor general by Poroshenko in February 2015, Shokin had not brought any cases of corruption to court involving Yanukovich or his partners. Nor had he prosecuted the hundreds of high-level corruption cases that had been brought to his office by Ukraine's parliamentary committee on preventing and combating corruption.
Several foreign governments, including the United States under the Obama administration, expressed concerns that Shokin was not doing enough to prosecute corruption cases. In fact, part of the reason that Joe Biden, then Vice President of the United States, pushed for Shokin's dismissal was due to widespread allegations that Shokin was either turning a blind eye to corruption or was himself involved in corruption. There were also allegations of corruption within Shokin's office. For example, two of his subordinates were caught with large amounts of cash and luxury items, raising questions about their activities.
Shokin claimed that he was fired because he was investigating the energy company Burisma, where Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, was a board member. The investigation into Burisma predated Hunter Biden's appointment to the board, and it was focused on the actions of the company's owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, particularly regarding issues like tax violations, money-laundering, and licenses given to Burisma during the time Zlochevsky served as Ukraine's Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources.
President Donald Trump’s efforts to tie Joe Biden to the removal of Shokin led to Trump’s first impeachment trial, which ended in acquittal in February 2020.
Hunter Biden's laptop was a highly controversial and politically charged topic in the United States. The laptop and its purported contents were first reported in October 2020 by the New York Post, which claimed to have received a hard drive from Rudy Giuliani, then President Donald Trump's personal lawyer. Giuliani, in turn, said he got it from a computer repair shop owner in Delaware. The laptop was alleged to belong to Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, who was a candidate in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election at the time and is now President.
The New York Post published a series of articles claiming the hard drive contained emails, texts, and other data that raised questions about Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine and China, among other issues. Some also believed the laptop contained material that could be damaging to Joe Biden, although nothing in the emails published directly implicated Joe Biden in any wrongdoing.
However, questions arose about the provenance of the laptop, the authenticity of the data, and whether the information was part of a disinformation campaign. Intelligence experts, and even some within the Trump administration, expressed concerns that the story had hallmarks of a foreign influence operation, though definitive proof was lacking.
Tech companies like Twitter and Facebook initially restricted the spread of the New York Post story, citing policies against disseminating hacked materials and misinformation. These actions themselves became highly controversial and sparked a wider conversation about the role of tech companies in moderating content, especially so close to an election.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) took possession of the laptop for examination, but had not released any public findings. Given the high stakes and the polarized political climate, this topic became a flashpoint in the wider discourse surrounding the 2020 election and its aftermath.
Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, two security experts who examined the data told The Washington Post 30 March 2022. The verifiable emails are a small fraction of 217 gigabytes of data provided to The Post on a portable hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey. The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified. Democrats have dismissed the story as probable disinformation, perhaps pushed by Russian operatives acting in a well-documented effort to undermine the elder Biden. In their examinations, the experts found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post. Sophisticated hackers could have altered the drive’s contents, in ways perhaps impossible to detect through forensic examination alone.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on 20 July 2023 released an unclassified FBI-generated record describing an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a Ukrainian business executive. Grassley acquired the record, an FD-1023, via legally protected disclosures by Justice Department whistleblowers. The 1023 form memorializes claims from an FBI informant, but it doesn't provide proof that the allegations were true.
The FBI stated "FD-1023s merely document that information; they do not reflect the conclusions of investigators based on a fuller context or understanding. Recording this information does not validate it, establish its credibility, or weigh it against other information known or developed by the FBI in our investigations. Protecting this type of information from wider disclosure is crucial to our ability to recruit sources and ensure the safety of the source or others mentioned in the reporting. "
In 2016, that Zlochevsky told the F.B.I. informant, “It cost 5 [million] to pay one Biden, and 5 [million] to another Biden,” as this conversation was recorded in the F.B.I. file, which, everything it reveals notwithstanding, contains redacted passages. Burisma CEO Mykola Zlochevsky reportedly said, “Don't worry Hunter will take care of all of those issues through his dad.” Zlochevsky reportedly stated that he had to pay $5 million to Hunter Biden and $5 million to Joe Biden, an arrangement he described as ‘poluchili,’ which was Russian crime slang for being “forced or coerced to pay,” according to the document. Zlochevsky also retained two documents, presumably financial records, as evidence of the arrangement, but said he didn’t send any funds directly to the “Big Guy,” a term understood to be a reference to Joe Biden.
The FD–1023 was rich with reporting from the agency’s informant. Describing the 2016 encounter in Vienna, the file quotes the informant thusly: “Zlochevsky made some comment that although Hunter Biden ‘was stupid, and his (Zlochevsky’s) dog was smarter,’ Zlochevsky needed to keep Hunter Biden (on Burisma’s board) ‘so everything will be okay.’” It then continues: “The source,” meaning the F.B.I. informant, “asked whether Hunter Biden or Joe Biden told Zlochevsky he should ‘retain’ the younger Biden; Zlochevsky allegedly replied, ‘They both did.’”
In the FBI’s record, the Burisma executive claims that he didn’t pay the ‘big guy’ directly but that he used several bank accounts to conceal the money. That sounds an awful lot like how the Bidens conduct business: using multiple bank accounts to hide the source and total amount of the money,” House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer said.
However, many observers, including those in Ukraine and in the international community, stated that the investigation into Burisma was dormant at the time Shokin was fired. Moreover, the push for Shokin's dismissal was part of a broader international effort to combat corruption in Ukraine. Shokin's removal as Prosecutor General was urged by a number of entities, including the U.S. government, the European Union, and international financial institutions, due to concerns over his perceived unwillingness or inability to pursue corruption cases.
Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's confidant Mykola Martynenko remained chairman of the energy committee in Ukraine's unicameral parliament, or Rada, although Switzerland has been directing investigations into him for at least half a year. Martynenko was suspected of transferring bribes worth millions to a Swiss account. It was doubtful that the Ukrainian prosecutor general provided the Swiss with satisfactory support.
All in all, many Ukrainian leaders use the conflict with Russia as an excuse for their failure to act. Instead of building democratic structures, the country seems to be stabilizing the old system of oligarchy, cronyism and corruption. Russian President Vladimir Putin has thus achieved his goal of halting Ukraine's establishing stronger bonds with the United States and EU.
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