Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testifies before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill Friday, Nov. 15, 2019, during Donald Trump’s first impeachment hearing. (Credit: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, one of the Democrats’ star witnesses in their first impeachment of Donald Trump, received repeated briefings, emails and memos related to the Ukrainian energy company that employed Hunter Biden, according to declassified documents that directly conflict with her and other witnesses’ testimony in the failed bid seven years ago to remove the president from office.
The documents released Friday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force show Yovanovitch and her aides were apprised of corruption concerns about Burisma Holdings, efforts by the company to repair its image or curry U.S. favor that would not “pass The Washington Post sniff test” and even a bid to get the Trump administration to approve a U.S. visa for Burisma’s controversial owner Mykola Zlochevsky, who was banned from American travel.
The memos provide a stark contrast to Yovanovitch’s testimony that the Biden-Burisma matter “just wasn’t a big deal” during her tenure as ambassador, and that she wasn’t briefed by staff on the issues surrounding Joe Biden’s son except for an initial briefing book during her 2016 Senate confirmation and what she read in the news media.
Yovanovitch and her top aides engaged in dozens of communications between 2016 and 2019 about Burisma, Hunter Biden, Zlochevsky and efforts by their legal defense teams and lobbyists to make investigations go away or curry favor for a company the State Department deemed to be corrupt, according to the documents the task force released, and additional memos obtained by Just the News under open records litigation.
A newly declassified email between Yovanovitch and her top deputy in Kyiv, George Kent, also directly challenges the primary argument Democrats made at the late 2019 House impeachment, namely that Hunter Biden’s relationship with Burisma had no impact on U.S. policy, and therefore it was wrong for Trump to seek investigations into the Burisma scandal.
“The real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter’s presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine b/c Ukrainians heard one message from us and then saw another set of behavior with the family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules,” Kent wrote to Yovanovitch on Nov. 22, 2016.
Just the News first reported on that email while it was still classified, but the White House has now declassified it.
You can read all the documents below:
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