Former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign pushed back against a report Wednesday that he had met with an adviser to the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2015 while his son, Hunter, was on the company’s board.
Biden had previously told the media, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”
The New York Post obtained a “smoking gun” email from Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma in 2015, thanking Hunter Biden for arranging a meeting with then-Vice President Biden in Washington, DC. Hunter Biden had been hired in 2014.
The email was contained on a hard drive that had been abandoned in a Delaware shop, the Post reports. The FBI reportedly seized the hard drive in December but the shop owner made a copy of it and provided it to a lawyer for Rudy Giuliani, the president’s attorney.
In a statement, the Biden campaign claimed that there was no such meeting on the vice president’s official schedules:
Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump Administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.
The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story. They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani — whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported — claimed to have such materials. Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.
The Trump campaign responded:
The Biden campaign does not dispute the authenticity of the emails published by the New York Post, which serves to confirm that they are real. And if Joe Biden never met with Vadym Pozharskyi, the Biden campaign would say so. They do not say that. Their answer basically is that the entry ‘Meeting with Ukrainian businessman buying access to the Vice President’ does not appear on Joe Biden’s official schedule. Their response is so carefully worded that it reveals the truth in what they don’t deny. They also don’t address the overarching question of why Joe Biden lied to the American people about never discussing with Hunter Biden his corrupt business dealings with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Americans deserve a full accounting of the conversations Joe Biden had with Hunter, and what Joe Biden discussed with Vadym Pozharskyi.
Hunter Biden had previously contradicted his father’s claim never to have spoken with his son about his overseas business dealings in an interview with the New Yorker.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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