In newly released emails by the New York Post, Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden introduced his father while he was Vice President of the U.S. to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian government officials into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the energy company.
The Post says the meeting has never before been revealed to the public and is mentioned in an alleged email correspondence between Vadym Pozarskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, and Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter Biden joined the board at Burisma.
Shortly after this story broke from the New York Post, Facebook’s Policy Communications Director Andy Stone wrote on Twitter that Facebook will be “reducing its distribution on our platform”.
Stone appears to have a lengthy history working for U.S. government officials and in politics.
From 2007 to 2009, he worked as Communications Director for U.S. Congress. From 2011 to 2012, Stone worked for Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer as Press Secretary. Just before working for Facebook, Stone worked as Communications Director for House Majority PAC, a super PAC “focused on holding Republicans accountable and helping Democrats win seats in the House.”
The released email reads, “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,”.
In the past when Joe Biden has been asked about his son’s ties to Burisma, Biden claimed that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings”.
Less than eight months after Pozharski sent the email thanking Hunter Biden for the introduction to his father Joe Biden, the then Vice President to U.S. President Barack Obama pressured the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to fire the Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin who was investigating Burisma Holdings by threatening to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee, during a 2015 December trip to Kiev.
At the 2018 Council of Foreign Relations, Joe Biden spoke about the incident saying “I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,”
Fox News is reporting that the emails are now under investigation by the Senate Homeland Security Committee after the hard-drive report. Chairman of the committee Ron Johnson says the panel is working to validate the information released.
The committee Chairman told Fox News that the committee has been in touch with the person who provided the emails to the New York Post and is in the process of validating the information contained in them.
Read the full story from the New York Post here.
