Top House Oversight Democrat releases transcript disputing Biden bribery allegations
Reese Gorman
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The Ukrainian oligarch at the center of the alleged bribery scandal involving Hunter Biden and then-Vice President Joe Biden claimed in a 2019 interview he never interacted with the former vice president, according to newly released transcripts from House Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-MD).
The transcripts were from an interview with Mykola Zlochevsky, the head of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company in which Hunter Biden sat on the board. In the transcripts, Zlochevsky told an associate of Rudy Giuliani, “No one from Burisma ever had any contacts with VP Biden or people working for him during Hunter Biden’s engagement.”
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At the time of the interview with Zlochevsky in 2019, Giuliani was reportedly seeking dirt on the Bidens on behalf of then-President Donald Trump ahead of the 2020 election.
While the meetings between Zlochevsky and Giuliani associates have been reported in the past, this is the first time the transcripts have been released to the public. They were provided to Congress by Lev Parnas, an associate of Giuliani, Raskin said.
Zlochevsky’s statement in the transcript contradicts what Oversight Republicans said is in an unverified FBI-generated FD-1023 tip sheet from a paid FBI informant. According to people who have viewed the document, it alleges that Zlochevsky paid $5 million to both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden to pressure the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor who was allegedly investigating Burisma.
In January 2018, Joe Biden boasted that he ordered the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin or the White House would renege on a commitment to provide aid.
“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 Biden said.
In the transcripts, Zlochevsky said he had no knowledge as to why Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin, saying he learned of the prosecutor’s firing from “newspapers and the internet.”
“Despite being interviewed as part of a campaign by Mr. Giuliani and his proxies in 2019 and 2020 to procure damaging information about the Biden family, Mr. Zlochevsky explicitly and unequivocally denied those allegations,” Raskin said in a letter to Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) that accompanied the transcripts. “Specifically, Mr. Zlochevsky denied that anyone at Burisma had ‘any contacts’ with then former Vice President Biden or his representatives while Hunter Biden served on the Burisma board, and that former Vice President Biden or his staff ‘in any way’ assisted Mr. Zlochevsky or Burisma.”
Burisma also became a hot-button topic when Trump referenced it in a July 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The call spurred a whistleblower complaint, which led to Trump’s first impeachment.
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In a statement, Comer pushed back against Raskin’s release and claimed this doesn’t disprove what is in the FD-1023 tip sheet.
“If Ranking Member Raskin thinks there is nothing to the FD-1023 form, then he should join us in calling on the FBI to make it public,” Comer said. “Ranking Member Raskin, however, is again intentionally lying about the FBI’s Biden bribery record. This record is not part of the material Rudy Giuliani provided the FBI. This unclassified record stands on its own and memorializes a confidential human source’s conversations with a Burisma executive dating back to 2015.”
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