Documents made public by the White House Government Transparency Task Force show that Burisma Holdings’s efforts to improve its image with the United States extended into President Donald Trump’s first term while Hunter Biden still served on its board. In September 2017, eight months into Trump’s presidency, a senior director at the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University emailed then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch for her views on a proposal from Burisma, then a major private Ukrainian natural gas and energy production company, and its Washington lobbyists, Blue Star Strategies, to help train Ukraine’s prosecutors, according to emails released on Friday by the task force.
A Blue Star representative and Burisma executive had asked the institute to host a “two-week Leadership Development and Professional Capacity Building program” for Ukrainian public prosecutors, the institute official wrote.
The email said Ukraine’s chief prosecutor had proposed the program and that Burisma would pay for it. The official noted the institute had run similar programs for delegations from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Pakistan and was “just doing due diligence.”
“But I have a quick request for your views on a leadership training proposal we have received,” the institute’s senior director wrote to Yovanovitch. “[Redacted] of lue Star Strategies, together with Vadym Poharskyi of the Burisma Group have asked us whether we could provide a two-week Leadership Development and Professional Capacity Building program for Ukrainian public prosecutors proposed to us by the Ukrainian Chief Prosecutor.
Yovanovitch forwarded the request to her deputy, George Kent, with a one-word question, “Thoughts?”
Kent’s reply was blunt. “A company which has been previously investigated by the GPO providing funding for training to the GPO by a US organization? Oi-yoi-yoi,” he wrote. GPO refers to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office. The proposal, he added, “would not pass the Washington Post sniff test.”
You can read the email chain below:
Yovanovitch asked Kent to summarize his concerns related to Burisma’s bad reputation in Ukraine so that she could write back with her assessment. In early October, she wrote to the institute urging caution about Burisma, Just the News previously reported. She noted that the company’s owner was widely believed to have benefited from Ukraine’s corrupt justice system.
Burisma’s campaign to rehabilitate its reputation in Washington began years earlier, while Hunter Biden, while father Joe Biden was vice president, sat on its board.
Early in his tenure, Biden helped the company recruit Blue Star, which was tasked with shutting down investigations into Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky and repairing his image. Blue Star also lobbied the U.S. embassy to restore Zlochevsky’s visa. Kent warned Yovanovitch in November 2016 that the younger Biden’s board seat undercut the U.S. anti-corruption message in Ukraine, Just the News previously reported.
The outreach continued under Trump. In February 2017, Burisma board member Cofer Black sought a courtesy call at the embassy. In January 2018, Blue Star requested a meeting with Yovanovitch about “a visa situation,” presumably related to Zlochevsky.
