Yuriy Lutsenko (Credit: Wikipedia)
After then-Vice President Joe Biden succeeded in pressuring Ukraine to remove its prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, the next person to hold the job had ties to Hunter Biden.
Yuri Lutsenko, the prosecutor general who took over for Shokin after his ouster in 2016 [May 12, 2016], had relied on the same lobbyists representing Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its chief executive for years, State Department emails suggest. Hunter Biden personally brought those lobbyists into the Burisma deal in 2015 for the purpose of shutting down investigations of Burisma’s chief executive, according to his own emails.
(…) An IRS whistleblower told lawmakers in May that, in 2020, Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf shut down an effort to get a search warrant for Blue Star Strategies’s emails.
Whether Shokin was indeed investigating Burisma and Zlochevsky at the time then-Vice President Joe Biden called for Shokin’s removal has become a flashpoint in the partisan debate over the Biden family’s business.
Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, offered little clarity to the debate.
Archer conceded that Shokin was a “threat” to Burisma and that his removal benefited the company.
“Then he was fired, and then somehow Burisma was let off the hook,” Archer told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week.
But he also said Burisma board members were provided a different version of events.
Archer said during a transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee that the “D.C. team” had suggested to the board that the firing of Shokin would pose problems for Zlochevsky because Shokin was “under control,” which Archer took to mean that the then-prosecutor general had been bribed.
A bribe was paid to a prosecutor general during Archer’s tenure on the Burisma board, and the removal of that prosecutor was indeed bad for Burisma, but it did not appear to be Shokin.
According to the State Department emails, the Obama administration believed Zlochevsky, Burisma’s chief executive, had “almost certainly” paid a bribe to Shokin’s predecessor, Vitaly Yarema, in December 2014 to shut down an investigation.
Archer and Hunter Biden were already on the Burisma board at that point, having joined the board earlier in 2014.
Yarema, the Ukrainian prosecutor general before Shokin, was accused of helping Zlochevsky by taking steps that resulted in the release of assets that a British court had seized from him. Yarema was the Ukrainian prosecutor who, the State Department believed, had received a bribe from Zlochevsky.
Shokin took over for Yarema in February 2015 and began investigating Burisma, evidence suggests, more aggressively.
In February 2016, which was after Joe Biden began calling for Shokin’s removal, Shokin’s office seized assets belonging to Zlochevsky, undermining the claim that Shokin was not investigating Burisma.
Under Lutsenko, the Ukrainian prosecutor who replaced Shokin and who seemingly had ties to Hunter Biden’s business orbit, the investigation into Zlochevsky ended.
Blue Star Strategies did not respond to a request for comment. (Read more: Washington Examiner, 8/29/2023) (Archive)