Former Polish president defends Hunter Biden
WARSAW, POLAND » Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former Polish president who is on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, said Thursday that Hunter Biden was indeed chosen to join its advisory board because of his name. He said that is simply how the world of business works.
But Kwasniewski insisted in an interview with The Associated Press that Biden was an active board member who helped the company, and that he never used his relationship with his father, Joe Biden, to further the company’s interests.
“I understand that if someone asks me to be part of some project it’s not only because I’m so good, it’s also because I am Kwasniewski and I am a former president of Poland,” he said. “And this is all interconnected. No-names are a nobody. Being Biden is not bad. It’s a good name.”
Kwasniewski also said Burisma members never tried to use Hunter Biden to curry favor with the administration of Barack Obama when Joe Biden was vice president.
“He was a normal member of this group,” he said. “We didn’t ask him — and he never said anything — about his father.”
Only at dinners was Biden sometimes asked how his father was doing and on one occasion Biden spoke about the death of his brother, Beau, Kwasniewski said.
He said Hunter Biden carried out research and brought a unique American perspective to the company, including in the areas of corporate governance, capital markets and gas drilling equipment, where Americans are world leaders. “He collected information,” Kwasniewski said. “He was useful for us because he knew something that we didn’t know.”
Biden’s time on the board from 2014 to 2019 has become a focus of the impeachment hearings into President Donald Trump. Trump is under scrutiny for pressing Ukraine’s young new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to carry out investigations into the Bidens and Burisma, withholding for a time nearly $ 400 million in military aid as a war drags on in Ukraine’s east against Russia-backed separatists.
Kwasniewski said requests made to Ukraine’s prosecutor by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, seeking to obtain comments depicting Burisma as corrupt, created a dangerous situation for the company.
Asked to respond to Trump describing Hunter Biden as a “disgrace” due to his Burisma connection, Kwasniewski shot back: “This man is speaking about someone who is disgraced? Donald Trump? It should be forbidden for him.”