BIDEN, UKRAINIAN didn’t meet, his campaign says.
Paper claims he huddled with Ukranian energy firm official
The New York Post reported Wednesday that former Vice President Joe Biden met with a senior official from a Ukrainian energy firm that was at the center of a controversy over the dismissal of a prosecutor investigating the company.
The Biden campaign denied the report.
“We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.
The newspaper cited emails it said it was given by surrogates of President Donald Trump. The report said that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board at Burisma, thanked Hunter Biden, the son of the Democratic presidential nominee, in an April 2015 email for inviting him to Washington and “giving an opportunity to meet your father.” The then-vice-president’s son had joined the company’s board about a year earlier, according to the Post.
A May 2014 email also showed Pozharskyi sought advice from Hunter Biden on ways “you could use your influence” on Burisma’s behalf, the paper reported. The email and the Post story don’t detail whether Biden ever met Pozharskyi.
The Post claims that the communication contradicts an assertion by Joe Biden that he hasn’t spoken to his son about his business dealings. Bloomberg News hasn’t independently verified the authenticity of the purported emails.
The newspaper reported that the recovered data came from a laptop and hard drive that were abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware in April 2019. The shop owner said he alerted the FBI, and photos of a Delaware federal court subpoena given to The Post show that both the computer and hard drive were seized by federal agents in December, according to the report.
But before turning it over to federal law enforcement, the Post reported, the shop owner made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to Robert Costello, an attorney for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, now an ally of Trump and his reelection campaign.
Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, disclosed the existence of the hard drive in late September, and Giuliani gave the Post a copy of the hard drive on Sunday, the paper reported.
Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh told reporters the campaign heard about the alleged emails from the New York Post.
“The real question is, as of course this has been seized by the FBI since then, why has the FBI been sitting on this?” Murtaugh said, adding, “I would also further point out that no one seemed to care when someone committed an obvious federal crime by leaking the president’s tax documents to the New York Times.”
Trump has charged that Joe Biden’s actions in Ukraine, in which he pushed for the dismissal of the country’s prosecutor general, were to benefit Hunter Biden.
In pushing for the firing of Viktor Shokin, Biden has said he was acting in concert with official U.S. foreign policy and other allied nations that viewed Shokin as corrupt.
The investigation into Burisma had long been dormant by the time Joe Biden was pushing for Shokin’s ouster in early 2016, a former Ukrainian official told Bloomberg News in May 2019.
Two Republican Senate committee chairmen last month tried to revive allegations around Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine but their report broke little new ground in finding that his role on the board of Burisma put State Department officials in an “awkward” position. Their findings disclosed no impact on policy nor proved wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, Facebook Inc. said it will reduce distribution of the New York Post story, seeking to slow the pace of its spread before the social network’s fact-checkers have a chance to evaluate its authenticity.
Twitter Inc. is also warning users before they read the article. While tweets that include the link don’t have any kind of warning, users who click on the story are brought to a landing page that says “this link may be unsafe.” Twitter blocks links that could “mislead people,” among other things, according to the company’s policy.
The Trump campaign charged that Facebook’s reduced distribution of the story as evidence for claims of anti-conservative bias. “Silicon Valley leftists are now openly bragging about interfering with the election,” the campaign said in an email to supporters.