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Mykola Zlochevsky founder of Burisma Holdings in Kiev, Ukraine – 19 Mar 2012
NEW YORK (77WABC) — A classified U.S. State Department email from 2016 shows a leading diplomat warning that Hunter Biden’s job with a Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings “undercut” American efforts to fight corruption in the Eastern European country.
Just the News — which published the email — said its existence was never acknowledged during several court battles over Freedom of Information Act requests that sought records related to business dealings involving the Hunter and his father, President Joe Biden.
The report came one day after the New York Times sued the State Department for allegedly withholding emails and memos involving Hunter Biden and his former business associates that were sent to or received by officials at the US Embassy in Romania.
In the Nov. 22, 2016, email, former State Department official George Kent — deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Ukraine at the time — recounted a discussion in which he detailed the “saga” surrounding the graft case against Mykola Zlochevsky, a former Ukrainian natural resources minister and the founder of Burisma Holdings. Burisma paid Hunter Biden $1 million a year to sit on its board.
Kent recalled saying “that the real issue to my mind was that someone in Washington needed to engage VP Biden quietly and say that his son Hunter’s presence on the Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine.”
“Ukrainians heard one message from us and then saw another set of behavior, with the family association with a known corrupt figure whose company was known for not playing by the rules in the oil/gas sector,” Kent added.
Kent’s email was classified “Confidential” by then-US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Both of them were key witnesses against former President Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial in 2019.
