A recently unearthed classified email from 2016 shows that at least one top U.S. State Department official was concerned about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine, warning that they could “undercut” U.S. efforts to crack down on Ukrainian corruption.
The email, which was obtained by Just the News, was written on November 22, 2016, by former U.S. embassy official George Kent, one of the Democrats’ main witnesses in their first effort to impeach former President Donald Trump.
The email was “classified ‘confidential,’ the lowest level of secrecy, by then-U.S. Ambassador to Kiev Marie Yovanovitch, another of the Democrats’ impeachment witnesses, and was not produced as evidence to House lawmakers during impeachment. Contrary to federal law, the State Department failed to acknowledge the existence of the document to the court or to Just the News in its multiple Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against the State Department seeking records on Hunter and Joe Biden’s dealings in Ukraine,” Just the News reported.
“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,” Kent wrote in the email sent to multiple high-ranking officials in the State Department in Washington.
According to Just the News, “Kent even relayed to higher-ups that he had confirmed with Ukrainian prosecutors that Burisma officials had paid a $7 million ‘bribe’ to make one of the cases against the company disappear. The bribe was allegedly paid at a time when Hunter Biden was serving on the Burisma board, a job that landed his firm more than $3 million from the Ukrainian energy company.”
Kent wrote that the “bribe” could cause Ukraine to perceive a double standard from the U.S. as the U.S. tried to fight Ukrainian corruption.
“Ukrainians heard one message from us,” Kent wrote. “And then saw another set of behavior, with the [Biden] family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules in the oil/gas sector.”
Just the News also pointed out that the email contradicts the narrative pushed by Democrats about Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
“Most importantly, the email’s stark message directly conflicts with the narrative the mainstream media, State Department witnesses and Democratic congressmen gave the public two years ago, when they insisted Hunter Biden’s lucrative job with the allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings — while creating the appearance of a conflict of interest — had no impact on U.S. efforts to fight corruption in that country,” the outlet wrote.