The final report of the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden upends a narrative promoted during the first impeachment of former President Trump, showing that in fact Biden changed official U.S. policy in a way that benefited Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where his son served on the board. Biden and his surrogates vehemently have repeatedly denied those allegations.
After more than a year of investigation, the evidence shows then-Vice President Joe Biden changed official policy by calling an “audible” on a flight to Kyiv, linking a $1 billion loan guarantee for the struggling country to its firing of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky. This finding confirms several Just the News reports.
During the 2019 impeachment of President Trump, government witnesses and Congressional Democrats widely repeated the same claim: that Joe Biden did not change U.S. policy and that the Ukrainian prosecutors were not investigating Burisma.
Former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified that calling for Shokin’s firing was “official U.S. policy,” former Trump envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volkert said the firing "was widely understood internationally to be the right policy,” and another former diplomat, David Holmes, testified that Shokin "was not at that time pursuing investigations of Burisma or the Bidens.”
Last year, House Oversight Committee Ranking Member, Jamie Raskin, D-M.D., also said the theories that Joe Biden changed official U.S. policy or that Burisma was under investigation by Shokin were “debunked.”
USA Today, FactCheck.org, and CNN, among dozens of other media outlets called the allegations "debunked" and The Washington Post opined that "This is smoke without a fire."
Joe Biden calls an "audible," shifts from official policy
Just a month before Thanksgiving in 2015, a task force of top State, Treasury and Justice Department officials had decided that Ukraine and its new top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, had made enough progress on anti-corruption reforms for the country to receive a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee, Just the News previously reported.
They drafted a term sheet for the delivery of the new aid to then-Ukrainian President Pedro Poroshenko during Biden’s December 2015 trip to Ukraine, and were making plans to invite Shokin’s top staff to Washington in January for a high-level meeting. Shokin himself even got a letter from the State Department declaring it was “impressed” with his reform efforts.
Two Nov. 22, 2015, memos—while demanding Shokin’s ouster—urged the vice president to offer the $1 billion loan guarantee during his trip, according to the documents reviewed by Just the News.
By the time Biden got to Kyiv on Dec. 8-9, 2015, he had altered the plan, deciding to threaten withholding the loan guarantees until Poroshenko fired Shokin, something he would brag about in a 2018 broadcast on C-SPAN.
The reporting on these memos by Just the News spurred the Washington Post fact-checkers to revise the central narrative around Biden’s December 2015 visit to Kyiv, now reporting through interviews with former Obama administration officials that then-Vice President Biden “called an audible”—or changed the plan—to link Viktor Shokin’s firing with the $1 billion loan guarantee.
Before this change in policy, the report notes, there was no indication that Joe Biden would link Shokin’s firing with the loan guarantee. Instead, the committees argue that a December 2015 phone call Hunter Biden made to his father on behalf of Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky, may have “sparked” the change.
Biden showed no indication of this policy change before son’s phone call
In his testimony before the House Oversight Committee, Devon Archer—the longtime business associate of Hunter Biden and fellow Burisma board member—told Congress that Burisma Holdings was pressuring the Biden to deal with the Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.
During a Dec. 2015 Burisma board meeting in Dubai and just days before then-Vice President Biden’s trip to Kyiv, Zlochevsky and Burisma executive Vadim Pozharskyi asked Hunter Biden to “call D.C.,” according to Archer’s testimony about the event. “The request was I think they were getting pressure and they requested Hunter, you know, help them with some of that pressure,” Archer said.
“What did Hunter Biden do after he was given that request?” the committee asked Archer. “Listen, I did not hear this phone call, but he—he called his dad,” Archer responded. He said Pozharskyi told him that’s what the call had been about afterwards.
The committees believe this series of events makes it likely that Biden was influenced by his son’s call, since he “unilaterally” decided to impose a new condition on the loan guarantee with little warning.
“Evidence demonstrates that Hunter Biden called his father, then-Vice President Biden, to help alleviate the pressure that Burisma and its owner Mykola Zlochevsky faced from Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s investigation into the company,” the committees wrote in the report.
“This phone call appears to have sparked Vice President Biden to condition a third $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee on Prosecutor General Shokin’s firing,” they add.
Burisma was under active investigation
The House Oversight Committee's attempted to refute the narrative by saying that Biden could not have improperly changed U.S. policy towards Ukraine to benefit his son because Shokin was not actually threatening Burisma. For example, one former diplomat, David Holmes, testified during Trump’s 2019 impeachment that Shokin "was not at that time pursuing investigations of Burisma or the Bidens.”
However, testimony and documents gathered by the impeachment inquiry show that Burisma at least believed that Shokin’s probe was active and that they expressed feeling threatened by the investigation.
In September 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt gave a speech in Odessa criticizing the prosecutor general’s office for failing to pursue corruption allegations against Burisma in the period before Shokin became the head of the office. The speech galvanized the prosecutor general’s office to launch an effort to seize assets of Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky, which was carried out in February 2016.
In addition, the speech later prompted U.S. news media to inquire about Hunter Biden’s role with the company.
After the media scrutiny ramped up, Hunter Biden recommended that Burisma hire Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat-connected firm. On Nov. 2, 2015, Vadim Pozharskyi—the Burisma executive and associate of Hunter Biden—emailed the team questioning the scope of the work that Blue Star would perform. He made abundantly clear the real purpose for hiring the firm.
“The scope of work should also include organization of a visit of a number of widely recognized and influential current and/or former US policy-makers to Ukraine in November aiming to conduct meetings with and bring positive signal/message and support on Nikolay's issue to the Ukrainian top officials above with the ultimate purpose to close down for any cases/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine,” Pozharskyi wrote the team.
This email was released to the impeachment inquiry committees by IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, who led a tax investigation into Hunter Biden but came to Congress after what they claimed was favorable treatment of the first son by the Justice Department.
In a media interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on X, Devon Archer expanded on his prior testimony, making clear that Burisma viewed Shokin as a threat.
“And so at the end of the day Shokin was taking a look and again, I wasn’t involved in Shokin or any of this, but he was a threat,” Archer told Carlson. “He ended up seizing the assets of, of, Nikolai (Mykola Zlochevsky)… house and cars, a couple of properties and, and Nikolai actually never went back to Ukraine after Shokin seized all of his assets,” he continued.
Important puzzle piece still missing: the drafts
Armed with this mountain of evidence, the impeachment committees requested drafts of then-Vice President Biden’s planned speech to the Ukrainian parliament in Dec. 2015 in an effort to understand what, if any, changes had been made to the speech, the report says. However, despite the National Archives locating these documents, the Biden White House refuses to allow the agency to turn them over, obstructing the investigation.
The report notes that—based on reasoning invoked by the House Democrats during Donald Trump’s 2019 impeachment—“the House should infer that the drafts of the speech the White House refuses to produce to the Oversight Committee are harmful to the President’s position.”
