GOP had evidence disproving Biden bribery claims in 2019, top Democrat says

The top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee has released evidence that casts significant doubt on GOP claims that the FBI ignored evidence that President Joe Biden accepted a bribe from a Ukrainian energy mogul during his time as vice president.

In a letter to House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin reminded his GOP counterpart that Congress has had evidence “that directly contradicts the allegations” levied against Mr Biden in an FBI form which Republicans have claimed to be proof of alleged corruption on the part of the president.

“As part of the impeachment inquiry against then-President Trump, Congress learned that ... the Ukrainian oligarch and the owner of Burisma, whom Republican Committee Members appear to have identified as the source of the allegations memorialized in the Form FD-1023, squarely rebutted these allegations in 2019,” Mr Raskin said.

The Republican accusations against Mr Biden have largely been based around similar claims floated nearly four years ago by Rudolph Giuliani, the disgraced former New York City mayor who in 2019 traveled to Ukraine to help then-president Donald Trump dig up dirt on Mr Biden, who was then preparing to launch his candidacy in the 2020 presidential election.

Mr Giuliani and his allies met with FBI officials to accuse Mr Biden of having accepted millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for pushing Ukraine’s then-president, Petro Poroshenko, to fire his country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in the waning months of the Obama administration.

Mr Shokin later claimed that this was the reason he was fired, and Republicans — most notoriously Mr Giuliani — have said Mr Biden’s work urging Mr Poroshenko to sack Mr Shokin was a personal errand, even though Mr Biden was expressing the wishes of the US government, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and other Western entities when he communicated the Obama administration’s demand that Mr Shokin be shown the door.

An FBI informant, who The Independent previously identified as most likely being Mr Giuliani, alleged that Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma — the Ukrainian energy firm which employed Mr Biden’s son Hunter as a board member — paid the then-vice president $5m to push for Mr Shokin’s firing.

But according to a transcript of an interview with Mr Zlochevsky which Giuliani associate Lev Parnas provided to Congress during the first impeachment of Mr Trump, the Burisma founder said years ago that his company never had any contact with the elder Mr Biden.

In his letter, Mr Raskin wrote that the Ukrainian executive “explicitly and unequivocally denied” the allegations of bribery. He said Mr Zlochevsky also “denied (1) 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 (2) that former Vice President Biden or his staff “in any way” assisted Mr. Zlochevsky or Burisma”.

Mr Raskin added that the “full factual context surrounding the [FBI form] —including Mr. Zlochevsky’s statements contradicting the reported information — is crucial to properly understanding these allegations”.  

“In this case, that context includes not just repeated and failed efforts in 2019 and 2020 by Mr. Giuliani, Senate Republicans, and Trump’s Justice Department to find support for these allegations, but also clear evidence that then-Vice President Biden’s actions carried out the policy of the United States, its allies, and its international partners to combat corruption in Ukraine,” he said.