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:
Burisma Holdings, an energy company in Ukraine, employed Hunter Biden on its board of directors and was at the center of allegations that former Vice President Joe Biden had exploited his influence over the United States’ policy in Ukraine to shield the company from a Ukrainian corruption investigation into its founder, the Ukrainian oligarch Zlochevsky. State Department officials, including Kent, believed Burisma and its founder to be corrupt.
In her Oct. 11, 2019 testimony at the height of the Trump impeachment, Yovanovitch told congressional investigators that she did not recall embassy staff briefing her on the Hunter Biden and Burisma situation beyond what she was told in a pre-confirmation hearing preparation session.
“Once you arrived in country did the embassy staff brief you on issues relating to Burisma?” an investigator asked the ambassador.
“No, it was — it was not. I don’t recall that I was briefed on that,” Yovanovitch answered. She later added that “it just wasn’t a big deal.”
Yovanovitch may not have been complete in what she told Congress she knew
In her public impeachment testimony, Yovanovitch told lawmakers that “all I can tell you is it was a long time ago, and it just wasn’t a big issue,” referring to the Burisma investigation. “I may have had other information, but I don’t recall how I had that impression […]” she added.
Yet, evidence has emerged in the years since suggesting that Yovanovitch, who was removed from her post by Trump in May 2019 and later retired from the foreign service, knew more about the company than she let on during her impeachment testimony.
For example, State Department memos unearthed under a Freedom of Information Act request by Just the News showed Yovanovitch’s embassy in Kyiv, including the ambassador herself, was engaged in several discussions and meetings about Burisma as the gas firm scrambled during the 2016 election and transition to settle a long-running Ukrainian corruption investigation and to polish its image.
Yovanovitch, for instance, was specifically warned in an email by her top deputy in September 2016 — three years before her testimony — that Burisma had hired an American firm with deep Democratic connections called Blue Star Strategies to “rehabilitate the reputation” of the Ukrainian gas firm and that it had placed “Hunter Biden on its board,” the memos showed.
Closer ties to Hunter’s employer than originally revealed
Yovanovitch also met with Burisma executive Vadim Pozharskyi on at least two occasions, according to photographs obtained by Just the News from an archived version of Burisma’s now-defunct website.
In February 2017, U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission in Ukraine George Kent, under Yovanovitch, sent an email to the ambassador advising her that “the Burisma campaign of engagement continues.”
The diplomatic official was responding to a message from former CIA and State Department official turned Burisma board member Cofer Black, who requested a meeting with Yovanovitch, the new emails show.
“Dear Sir – I am Cofer Black who served at State …” Black wrote to Kent. “I am a new board member at Burisma Energy and plan to be in Kiev 15, 16, 17 March and would like to pay a courtesy call to introduce myself.”
