RUTHFULLY YOURS

Before getting off my current Bidens kick, I want to take just a one more moment to consider Joe Biden’s most recent response when he was asked by a radio interviewer in New Hampshire whether he had discussed with his son Hunter the son’s service on the board of Ukrainian gas producer Burisma. The interview aired on October 10 on a program called New Hampshire Today, with interviewer Jack Heath. Go here to listen to the full interview; or there is a summary here at the Washington Examiner.

Asked by Heath whether he had discussed the service on the Burisma board with Hunter, Joe initially uttered his previous oft-repeated talking point on the subject, namely that he “never” discusses the business endeavors of his family members because he wouldn’t want to make political or policy decisions that appear nepotistic. But then Joe remembered the one time that the subject came up:

“At one point that it came out that [Hunter] was on the board [of Burisma]. I said, ‘I sure hope to hell you know what you’re doing.’ Period. I said that.”

While I am letting that sink in with you, let me lay out again some of the relevant background.

Ukraine split off from Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Burisma was founded by Mykola Zlochevsky in 2002, and began producing gas in Ukraine in 2006. Zlochevsky was close to at least several of the Ukrainian Presidents between 2002 and 2014, when he fled Ukraine for Russia along with his then-patron Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

In Ukraine, you do not get the right to produce oil or gas by acquiring land or paying a private landowner for the right to drill; rather, you get the right by acquiring a license from the government. According to this Reuters piece from September 24, Burisma has 35 such licenses. Also, before you can start your production of oil or gas in Ukraine, you need to get various “permits” from various ministries. According to this piece from Radio Free Europe on September 15, in 2018 Ukraine cut the number of permits needed before commencement of production of oil or gas by 20. The piece doesn’t say how many permits you still need today. But those incremental 20 permits would have constituted 20 opportunities for 20 different people in the government to hit you up for bribes, unless you happened to have protectors at high levels.

The RFE piece also includes some quotes from an interview with new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Zelensky talks about trying to attract investment from oil and gas producers into Ukraine, and says that “[m]ajor international oil companies might be willing to come back to Ukraine if they see ‘signs of success’ in the field.” In other words, even as Burisma was somehow able to get 35 licenses to produce oil and gas in Ukraine since 2002, and 20+ permits per project to start producing, the majors had all for some mysterious reason given up and gone elsewhere.

On February 22, 2014, Yanukovych left the presidency of Ukraine and fled for Russia. February-March 2014 is also when Russia by military action annexed the Crimean Peninsula, formerly a part of Ukraine. In March 2014 Joe Biden became the “point man” for U.S. diplomacy in Ukraine. In May 2014, Hunter Biden got his $1 million per year gig as director of Burisma. Hunter held that position until earlier this year.

With that context, let us now consider Joe’s remark to Hunter that “I sure hope to hell you know what you are doing.”

There is one person here who clearly knew what he was doing, and that is Mykola Zlochevsky. In May 2014, he has just fled Ukraine for Russia with his patron Yanukovych, leaving behind natural gas assets worth in the low billions. Now, what do you think is the chance that Zlochevsky acquired all of those 35 natural gas licenses and 20+ permits per project in the preceding decade totally on the up and up — when no major international oil and gas producer was able to crack through and get any significant production going in the country? (See page 14 at this link for private sector natural gas producers in Ukraine. None are major international names.) Obviously, Burisma was hugely vulnerable to criminal investigations by prosecutors, now under control of a new regime. But that new regime was in turn hugely dependent on U.S. aid and assistance in fending off the existential threat of Russia. Really, it was a stroke of genius for Zlochevsky to recruit Hunter Biden for the board, whereupon any investigation that threatened Burisma would inherently also immediately threaten Hunter’s $1 mil per year, if not putting Hunter himself in criminal jeopardy. Would any Ukrainian President or prosecutor really ever take the gigantic risk of alienating Joe Biden — and the billions in U.S. aid that he controlled — just to take out the relatively insignificant fish of Burisma, whose head had in any event already left the country?

And sure enough, during the whole remainder of the Obama/Biden administration and even thereafter, no investigation of Burisma ever went anywhere. What do you know?

Note that nothing about this requires that Joe or Hunter or Mykola ever have had a specific conversation about this subject, or that Joe ever have issued any kind of specific request or order to the Ukrainians not to prosecute Burisma or Zlochevsky. It just goes without saying that a fragile new government in Ukraine is not going to put Hunter Biden in jeopardy when Joe is controlling their fate in the form of U.S. aid. It’s as simple as that.

But now let’s talk about someone who does not know what he is doing, indeed does not have a clue. Joe to Hunter: “I sure hope to hell you know what you are doing.” The question is not whether Hunter knew what he was doing, but rather whether Joe did. Is it really possible that Joe Biden could not have immediately figured out Zlochevsky’s intent in hiring his son in a do-almost-nothing position for $1 million per year? Does Joe really to this day have no idea that he had been corrupted? How dense can a person be? (The only alternative being, he is not dense at all, and was happy to sell out the U.S. taxpayer to get his son a million dollar per year gig.) THIS MAN IS THE LEADING CANDIDATE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!!