Hunter Biden investigation: What FBI bribery document says about first Trump impeachment
Sarah Bedford
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An FBI document outlining allegations of corruption involving the Biden family cast new light on the 2019 events that led to the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump.
The form, known as an FD-1023 and published on Thursday by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), laid out the details of an alleged bribery scheme from which Hunter Biden and his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, may have each earned $5 million to work toward shielding a Ukrainian energy company from prosecution.
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The document was compiled by the FBI from the recollections of a trusted informant who had worked previously with the bureau on other criminal cases. And it offered new context to claims made by Trump and his allies about the work Hunter Biden did for the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.
Democrats in Congress led an impeachment effort in 2019 after a whistleblower submitted a complaint to the intelligence community inspector general about a phone call between Trump and newly-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In that July 2019 phone call, Trump briefly mentioned his interest in finding out more about Joe Biden’s successful efforts to secure the removal of Ukraine’s top prosecutor at the time, Viktor Shokin.
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great,” Trump said to Zelensky during the phone call, according to a transcript the Trump White House released in September 2019.
That was enough to earn Trump an impeachment vote in the Democrat-controlled House in December of that year, based on the argument that the mention of the Biden family’s work in Ukraine rose to the level of election interference.
The newly-published FBI form lends new credibility to Trump’s request, however, and raises serious questions about Joe Biden’s interest in getting Shokin removed from office.
Under Shokin’s leadership, prosecutors in Ukraine were investigating Burisma and its president, Mykola Zlochevsky, at the time Joe Biden was vice president. Zlochevsky’s first name is also sometimes spelled Nikolay.
The informant had told the FBI that in 2015 and 2016, he or she had multiple conversations with Zlochevsky about the reason Burisma had hired Hunter Biden to serve on its board.
Zlochevsky told the confidential source that Burisma hired Hunter Biden for the influence of his father and that Hunter Biden himself provided little value because he was “not smart.”
At the time, the source said, Burisma was looking to purchase a U.S.-based energy company so it could conduct an initial public offering (IPO), or a chance to sell shares of the company on the American stock market.
Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor general at the time, could make that stock offering difficult, the source said he or she warned Zlochevsky.
The source “told Zlochevsky that due to Shokin’s investigation into Burisma, which was made public at this time, it would have a substantial negative impact on Burisma’s IPO in the United States. Zlochevsky replied something to the effect of, ‘Don’t worry, Hunter will take care of all of those issues through his dad,’” according to the FBI document published on Thursday.
During that conversation, which took place in 2016, the source told the FBI that he or she advised Zlochevsky to hire a Ukrainian lawyer and deal with the investigation directly, inside Ukraine, rather than try to expand its energy business into the U.S. market while also fighting the Ukrainian prosecutors.
“Zlochevsky said he/Burisma would likely lose the trial because he could not show Burisma was innocent,” the source said.
Around the same time, Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma was heating up, and it was focused specifically on helping Zlochevsky skirt the Ukrainian prosecutors’ investigation.
In one email from November 2015, for example, Hunter Biden’s business associates discussed what a revised proposal for work with Burisma should include.
One business associate admitted that the goal of the work was “improving Nikolay’s case and his situation in Ukraine,” but he acknowledged that leaving out the specific mention of Zlochevsky in the work proposal could be a good idea “to be on the safe and cautious side.”
A specific goal of the work Hunter Biden and his associate Devon Archer would perform for Burisma would be to organize a visit “of a number of widely recognized and influential current and/or former US policy-makers” who could come to Ukraine to “bring positive signal/message and support on Nikolay’s message” to top Ukrainian officials, “with the ultimate purpose to close down for any case/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine.”
In other words, an explicit purpose of the work for which Hunter Biden was to be paid would involve trying to shut down the investigations into Burisma and Zlochevsky, the company’s president.
The month after the email was sent, then-Vice President Joe Biden visited Ukraine, in Dec. 2015.
During a speech in Kyiv, he railed against the country’s struggle with corruption.
Joe Biden later recalled privately threatening to withhold $1 billion of aid if Ukrainian leaders did not remove Shokin. By February 2016, Shokin was out of office.
Democrats have in the past tried to dismiss the suggestion of impropriety in Joe Biden’s calls to remove Shokin because he and other Western leaders had accused Shokin of corruption and selective prosecution.
They argued that Joe Biden’s concern was that Shokin wasn’t being tough enough on Ukrainian crimes, and therefore the then-vice president could not possibly have been acting out of a desire to protect his family’s personal business interests.
But Hunter Biden’s emails suggest Burisma executives were deeply concerned about Shokin’s investigation into Zlochevsky and the company’s work.
And the informant told the FBI that Zlochevsky had boasted of having more than a dozen recordings, including two of conversations with Joe Biden himself, that proved he’d paid $5 million each to Hunter and Joe Biden to make the Burisma investigation disappear.
“[T]hese recordings evidence Zlochevsky was somehow coerced into paying the Bidens to ensure Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired,” the source told the FBI.
Shokin’s team had also moved aggressively against Zlochevsky, freezing his assets in 2016 as it dug into alleged crimes he’d committed.
And the Obama administration in which Joe Biden served privately acknowledged that Zlochevsky was known to work the system to avoid criminal investigations; in a September 2016 email, for example, a State Department official complained about the lobbying efforts on Burisma’s behalf and warned that the U.S. government believed Zlochevsky “almost certainly had paid a bribe” in 2014 to escape prosecution.
What steps the FBI took to investigate the bribery allegation remain unclear.
Beyond the intelligence from the informant, the FBI had access to bank records and private emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, both of which corroborate the source’s allegation.
The House Oversight Committee has published several memos based on bank records it obtained directly from financial institutions, and two high-level IRS whistleblowers have testified before Congress about the unusual arrangements Hunter Biden used to collect income indirectly from Burisma, just as the source said.
Hunter Biden’s emails suggest he and his associates were working specifically to lobby for Zlochevsky on multiple fronts, also corroborating the source’s allegations.
In February 2015, for example, Hunter Biden sent an email noting that he was working on helping Zlochevsky obtain a U.S. visa.
In February 2016, Hunter Biden relayed his thanks for the birthday gifts Zlochevsky, the CEO of Burisma, had sent him, commenting that the presents were “far too extravagant but much appreciated.”
By contrast, the same year these events took place, the FBI moved to obtain surveillance warrants on American citizens based on the second-hand claims of a less reliable source, sparking a yearslong investigation into Trump’s nonexistent ties to Russia.
The newly-published FBI document suggests Trump’s mention of the messy situation involving Burisma, Shokin, and the Biden family during the infamous 2019 phone call was far from a conspiracy theory.
Several IRS and FBI agents involved in the Hunter Biden investigation have testified to Congress this year about the credibility of allegations of corruption involving the Ukraine business, and the informant who provided the information in the FD-1023 document was a highly trusted informant for the FBI.
Trump’s opponents accused him of peddling deranged falsehoods by asking Zelensky about the removal of the Ukrainian prosecutor.
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Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said at the time that “the president of the United States has betrayed his oath of office and sacrificed our national security” by referencing the allegation.
Democrats said the mention of Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine during the call reached the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that allows for Congress to remove a president from office.