March 17, 2014 – Russia invades Crimean peninsula – annexes portion of Ukraine and regains access to deep water port in Black Sea with access to Mediterranean.
Joe Biden appointed to oversee Ukraine after Russia seizes Crimea [The Hill]
Early April 2014 – UK seizes $23 million in Bursima assets on money laundering charge when Burisma attempts to move the money to Cyprus.
Early April 2014 – Devon Archer (Yale roomate and business partner to Hunter Biden) meets with Joe Biden in White House one week before Archer joins board of Burisma. [The Hill]
April 18, 2014 – Hunter Biden appointed to board of directors of Burisma. Hunter and Archer receive payments Spring 2014-Fall 2015, totaling $3.1 million over 14 months, split between the two, with Hunter receiving $83K/month. [For background on Hunter’s other business dealings, including his lucrative China dealings while his father was in office and overseeing Chinese affairs, see Jim Geraghty’s comprehensive National Review timeline.]
April 22, 2014 – Biden travels to Ukraine and offers $50 million aid to Yatsenuk’s new government
Spring 2014 – Ukraine prosecutor Shokin opens investigation into Zlochevsky/Bursima at the request of UK; WSJ reports Zlochevsky was under investigation in a Ukrainian unlawful-enrichment probe and a separate Ukrainian into alleged abuse of power, forgery and embezzlement
January 2015 – UK closes Burisma investigation when Ukraine failed to produce requested documents by deadline; Ukraine’s Burisma investigation continues.
July 13, 2015 – Crowdstrike announces major investment by Google Capital (Google was the largest corporate donor to the Clinton campaign. Google Capital is owned by Alphabet, whose CEO Eric Schmitds strongly supported the Clinton campaign.) Other investors include Warburg Pincus, whose president, Timothy Geithner, worked for the Clinton and Obama administrations. [Washington Times]
August 2015 – Joe Biden polling high for 2016 presidential election
Fall 2015 – Hunter Biden stops receiving Burisma payments
October 2015 – Biden drops out of 2016 race [allegations are that the NY Times had begun investigating the Biden-Ukraine scandal by this time]
December 7, 2015 – Wall Street Journal publishes Biden exposé, “Ukrainians See Conflict in Biden’s Anticorruption Message”
December 9, 2015 – NY Times publishes Biden exposé, “Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch”
February 2015 – Shokin returns to Ukraine prosecutor’s position
March 2016 – Just days before the Shokin firing, BlueStar Strategies rep. Sally Painter met with Ukraine embassy official in D.C. to seek a meeting with the prosecutor’s office around the time of Joe’s upcoming visit, and was told to wait until the following week. Burisma’s accounting records show payments to BlueStar. [The Hill]
March 29, 2016 – The day Shokin’s firing is announced, Burisma’s legal defense rep. John Buretta (former U.S. Assistant Attorney General under Holder) calls to ask to speak to interim prosecutor Sevruk, but was denied according to Ukraine prosecutor’s memo.
April 6, 2016 – 2 BlueStar reps. Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano (formerly with the Clinton administration) and Burisma legal defense Buretta obtain meeting with interim Ukraine prosecutor Sevruk. They apologize “for the dissemination of false information by U.S. representatives and public figures on the activities of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine in regards to the investigation of criminal activities of Zlochevsky” and offer to set up DC meeting for new Ukraine prosecutor. [Ukraine prosecutor Sevruk’s memo]
New Ukraine prosecutor Lutsenko scales back Burisma investigation to tax evasion.
Summer 2016 – DNC hires Crowdstrike to investigate server breech; Crowdstrike identifies Russia as perpetrator. The DNC paid Crowdstrike more than $400,000 during 2016. [Washington Times]
November 2016 – Trump wins presidential election
January 2017 – Joe Biden visits Ukraine 10 days before Trump takes office.
January 2017 – Burisma investigation resolved in Ukraine days before Trump’s inauguration, and just after Burisma pays UAH 180 million (a few million U.S.$) back taxes [critics suggest this was a payoff to close the case]
January 2017 – Burisma signs cooperative agreement with Atlantic Council to sponsor their Eurasia Center [Kyiv Post] Crowdstrike cofounder Dmitri Alperovich is a senior fellow with Atlantic Council. The Atlantic Council is hawkish on Russia. In addition to funding from Burisma, it receives funding from the George Soros Open Society Foundation and Ukrainian billionaire who also donated millions to the Clinton Foundation, Viktor Pinchuk. [Daily Caller]
January 20, 2017 – Donald Trump inauguration
Feb. 1, 2017 – Kyiv Post publishes interview with Buretta in which he details timeline of Burisma investigation, saying Ukraine investigation began Aug. 2014 and was open for two years, and contradicting Joe Biden’s claim that the Burisma investigation was over when he demanded Ukraine prosecutor’s firing.
December 2017 – Crowdstrike issues report claiming Russia hacked Ukraine artillery app, and uses the findings to buttress its findings that Russia hacked the DNC servers. The International Institute for Strategic Studies disputes Crowdstrike’s Ukraine hack claim, however, and Crowdstrike subsequently revises and retracts part of its report according to the Voice of America.
January 2018 – Biden describes, at a Council on Foreign Relations event, his threat to withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine unless prosecutor Shokin is fired
May 24, 2018 – Intelligence Community Inspector General alters Disclosure of Urgent Complaint “whistleblower” policy (but not the form) to allow second-hand information. ICIG Press Release [The form stated “The [Intelligence Community Inspector General] cannot transmit information via the ICPWA based on an employee’s second-hand knowledge of wrongdoing,” under the bolded heading “FIRST-HAND INFORMATION REQUIRED.” The Federalist]
Summer 2018 – Ukraine begins trying to alert DOJ to possible ethics violations and pro-Clinton election meddling by Democrats in Ukraine.
If one bothers to study the subject of corruption in Ukraine, one finds as follows, and this is from Wikipedia, although that is but one of many articles on the subject, to wit:
Corruption is widespread in Ukrainian society.
Transparency International’s 2018 Corruption Perception Index ranks the country in 120th place out of 180 countries.
In 2012 Ernst & Young put Ukraine among the three most-corrupt nations of the world – alongside Colombia and Brazil.
In 2015 The Guardian called Ukraine “the most corrupt nation in Europe”.
According to a poll conducted by Ernst & Young in 2017, experts considered Ukraine to be the ninth-most corrupt nation in the world.
United States diplomats described Ukraine under Presidents Kuchma (in office from 1994 to 2005) and Yushchenko (in office from 2005 to 2010) as a kleptocracy, according to WikiLeaks cables.
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So, what in the hell are we doing in bed with those people, having our tax dollars squandered over there to continue to fuel that corruption, which is a way of life over there, as we see by returning to Wikipedia, as follows:
Ukrainian professor O. Bazaluk [uk] reports that the roots of the Ukrainian corruption stem from the Soviet nature of the Ukrainian political leaders, who used to be integrated into Communist nomenclature (ruling elite) before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The politicians created authoritarian-oligarchic governance regime in Ukraine where the corruption is ubiquitous and no chances to implement a European choice of the Ukrainian people.
Prominent Ukrainian economist O. Havrylyshyn [uk] performed a comparison of the Ukrainian corruption in wide global context based on data provided by Transparency International.
This research estimated the level of the corruption in Ukraine as comparable to countries of Sub-Saharan Africa with Uganda as the closest counterpart.
Bribes are given to ensure that public services are delivered either in time or at all.
Ukrainians stated they give bribes because they think it is customary and expected.
Some of the biggest bribes involve more than $1 million USD.
According to a 2008 Management Systems International (MSI) sociological survey, the highest corruption levels were found in vehicle inspection (57.5%), the police (54.2%), health care (54%), the courts (49%) and higher education (43.6%).
On June 8, 2011 Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych stated that corruption costs the state budget US$2.5 billion in revenues annually and that through corrupt dealings in public procurement 10% to 15% (US$7.4 billion) of the state budget “ends up in the pockets of officials”.
According to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the main causes of corruption in Ukraine are a weak justice system and an over-controlling non-transparent government combined with business-political ties and a weak civil society.
Corruption is regularly discussed in the Ukrainian media.
In May 2016 the IMF mission chief for Ukraine stated that the reduction of corruption was a key test for continued international support.
Some western analysts believe that large foreign loans are not encouraging reform, but enabling the corrupt extraction of funds out of the country.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland urged Ukraine to start prosecuting corrupt officials: “It’s time to start locking up people who have ripped off the Ukrainian population for too long and it is time to eradicate the cancer of corruption”.
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So what is it that we are really “funding” over there in that corrupt ****hole, and why are the congressional Democrats so protective of it?
It is interesting that on September 24, 2019, the Washington Post, not known for being critical of the Democrats, nonetheless had a story entitled “Democrats’ double standard on Ukraine” by a columnist named Marc A. Thiessen, which opened as follows:
We don’t yet know whether President Trump delayed some military aid to Ukraine as leverage to get Ukraine’s president to reopen an investigation into Hunter Biden.
But if we are concerned about U.S. officials inappropriately threatening aid to Ukraine, then there are others who have some explaining to do.
It got almost no attention, but in May, CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe.
In the letter, they implied that their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake.
Describing themselves as “strong advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine,” the Democratic senators declared, “We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump,” before demanding Lutsenko “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.”
So, it’s okay for Democratic senators to encourage Ukraine to investigate Trump, but it’s not okay for the president to allegedly encourage Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden?
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And the ready answer to that question, where the Democrats own the power of impeachment right now, which has as it concomitant the power to conduct cover-ups, the answer that question is yes – it is not okay for Donald Trump to encourage Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden, because of who Hunter Biden’s father is – a high-ranking Democrat who is their presidential standard-bearer as Obama’s vice president, which takes us back to the WaPo article as follows:
And then there is Joe Biden.
This weekend, Biden told reporters, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”
That is flatly untrue.
Hunter admitted in an interview with the New Yorker that his father expressed concern about the Burisma post at least once: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’”
Moreover, the New Yorker reports that, “In December, 2015, as Joe Biden prepared to return to Ukraine, his aides braced for renewed scrutiny of Hunter’s relationship with Burisma.”
“Amos Hochstein, the Obama Administration’s special envoy for energy policy, raised the matter with Biden.”
That same month, the New York Times published an article about how Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine undermined the vice president’s anti-corruption message, which quoted a Biden spokesman saying it had no impact.
So, Biden was fully aware of his son’s involvement with Burisma when he pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor in 2016.
He should have known that his using U.S. aid as leverage to force the prosecutor’s dismissal would create, at a bare minimum, the appearance of a conflict of interest.
Federal ethics regulations require “all employees to recuse themselves from participating in an official matter if their impartiality would be questioned.”
Biden violated these rules.
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Ah, yes, but, hey, well, okay, you know, he’s Joe Biden so HUSH!
SHHHHHHH!
Don’t say anything because Joe is a Democrat running for president which gives him immunity from OUR laws.
Getting back to the WaPo:
On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced that Congress will initiate a formal impeachment inquiry over the Ukraine episode, a move Joe Biden endorsed in a speech, declaring, “It’s time for the Congress to fully investigate the conduct of this president.”
Such an investigation will be far more damaging for Biden than the president.
It will keep the story of Biden’s conflict of interest in the news through the 2020 election.
Millions of Americans will learn the word “Burisma.”
Put aside the prosecutor’s firing.
Hunter took the position with a Ukrainian natural gas company just a few weeks after his father visited Ukraine in 2014 to urge its government to increase its natural gas production.
Hunter Biden had no expertise in Ukraine or natural gas.
It will not just be Republicans calling this suspicious; nonpartisan experts in ethics law will testify that this a major conflict of interest.
And the focus will not just be on Ukraine but also how, as The Post reported, “for more than two decades, [Hunter’s] professional work often tracked with his father’s life in politics, from Washington to Ukraine to China.”
The irony is the Democrats’ investigation might do more to deny Biden the presidency than Trump.
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And we people here in America who care about these things thank the Cape Charles Mirror for keeping this story alive, as it needs to be heading into November of this year and our election for our next president.