Democrats’ effort to revive Russia collusion claims against Trump an attempt to blunt impeachment runs into and inconvenient truth: Hunter Biden and partners targeted Vladimir Putin’s oligarchs for big bucks.
The effort to revive Russian collusion claims in Joe Biden’s impeachment probe is running into an inconvenient truth for Democrats: Hunter Biden and his business partners waged a concerted campaign to squeeze oligarchs in Vladimir Putin’s country for investments, an effort that ultimately paved the way for the first son to score a big payday from Burisma Holdings in neighboring Ukraine.
Hunter Biden and his partners’ pursuit of Russian riches began as early as 2010 with payments from a Moscow-based machinery firm and its “patriarch,” and they intensified a few years later at a time when Joe Biden’s son was actually still serving as a U.S. Navy officer. That timeline is confirmed by bank records, contemporaneous emails and congressional testimony that chronicle a far larger effort by Biden, Inc. to target Moscow than has previously been acknowledged.
Along the way, Hunter Biden and his partners like Devon Archer discussed plans to open up a Moscow office for their Rosemont firm, create a U.S-Russia business coalition and pursue a real estate venture with one oligarch that could have topped out at $1 billion, the evidence shows.
“Devon can send wiring instructions,” Hunter Biden emailed one partner in 2010. The wire was for a $25,000 engagement fee from Moscow to be paid by a Russian machinery firm, the emails show.
Eventually, their grand Russian ambitions came crashing down in spring 2014 when Putin’s invasion of the Crimean region of Ukraine drove a wedge between Russia and the West, the records show.
But by that time, the meetings that Biden and his partners had scored across eastern Europe had opened a door to Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch who would invite Hunter Biden and Archer onto the board of Burisma, an energy firm that had been deemed corrupt by the Obama-Biden State and Justice Departments.
By Steven Richards and John Solomon
