Tech investor ‘asked to lie about Biden’s son’
A UKRAINIAN businessman who advised the country’s former president has claimed he was offered a US visa in return for information on Hunter Biden that would damage his father’s presidential campaign.
Hares Youssef, a Ukrainian-syrian national who was a Middle East adviser to Viktor Yushchenko, said he was asked to invent links between Joe Biden’s son and a business deal with one of his former associates that had gone wrong. “The deal was to lie,” Mr Youssef told The Times. “I had never even met him. But the hunting dogs were out for Hunter Biden.”
He claims he was approached by a team working with a friend of his, Dmytro Firtash, a Kremlin-l i nked Ukrainian oligarch. Mr Firtash, who has faced extradition to America since 2014, had himself reportedly made a deal with associates of Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, that would quash his extradition order in return for any evidence of scandal surrounding the Bidens.
Mr Youssef was an i nvestor in mbloom, a tech start-up fund backed by Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner.
“I told them Hunter Biden wasn’t linked to mbloom,” Mr Youssef insisted. “I said it was impossible … It would break the story because it’s not true.”
Mr Youssef was arrested in Vienna in 2017 for alleged laundering of money for Mr Firtash and Russian organised crime. Mr Youssef denies these charges and the case was dropped, but his American visa was revoked.
“Somebody from Firtash’s team asked me if I wanted to get my visa back,” Mr Youssef claimed. “They said if we solved the problem in the United States, we can solve the problem of your visa; you can even get immunity if we can use your investment in mbloom in this Hunter Biden case.”
He said he did not know if Mr Firtash was aware of the offer.
In a response to The Times, Mr Firtash’s team reiterated his earlier claim that he did not collect any information. The Trump campaign and Mr Giuliani declined to comment.
‘They said if we solved the problem in the US, we can solve the problem of your visa, you can get immunity’