As the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden ramps up, “Burisma Holdings” might well become a U.S. household name. Consortium News has been on the story for nine years.
And we plan on staying on it as a possible impeachment of Joe Biden approaches. Help us to provide coverage as we learn more about what Joe Biden was really up to in Ukraine a decade ago.
After the 2014 Coup
The U.S.-installed government in Kiev outlawed political parties, including the Communist Party, and stripped Russian as an official language. Ousted President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions was banned in several oblasts and eventually collapsed. An American citizen became finance minister and Vice President Joe Biden became Barack Obama’s virtual viceroy in Ukraine. Three months later, Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, Burisma Holdings, appointed Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors.
Videos have emerged of Biden then giving instructions to the nominal president at the time, Petro Poroshenko. By his own admission, Biden forced the resignation of Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general.
Shokin testified under oath that he was about to investigate Burisma Holdings, the company on which the vice president’s son was given a lucrative board membership just months after the U.S.-backed coup.
Biden, other U.S. officials, and the media at the time lied that Shokin was removed because he was corrupt. State Dept. memos released last year and published by Just the News actually praise Shokin for his anti-corruption work. The question of whether the leader of a foreign nation has the right to remove another country’s prosecutor was buried. With the emergence of Hunter Biden’s laptop, more lies have surfaced, such as that Joe Biden was never involved at all with Hunter’s business dealings.
Here are just a few of the many articles we’ve published starting in September 2014, seven months after the coup, when our founding editor, Bob Parry, first introduced readers to the Burisma story.
From the article: “Further supporting the ‘natural gas motive’ is the fact that it was Vice President Joe Biden who demanded that President Yanukovych pull back his police on Feb. 21, a move that opened the way for the neo-Nazi militias and the U.S.-backed coup. Then, just three months later, Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, Burisma Holdings, appointed Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors.”
From the story:“That’s the biggest crime in this story that isn’t being told. The illegal overthrow of a sovereign government. As booty from the coup, the sitting vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, soon got a seat on the board of Ukraine’s biggest gas producer, Burisma Holdings. This can only be seen as a transparently neocolonial maneuver to take over a country and install one’s own people.”Oct. 8, 2019
From the story: Can you imagine if the Trump administration finally succeeded in overthrowing the Venezuelan government and a couple of months later Vice President Mike Pence’s son(who wasn’t kicked out of the Navy for drug use) lands a spot on the board of a privatized Venezuelan national oil company? That is exactly what happened with Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine.And then imagine that the U.S.-installed government of Juan Guaidó begins an investigation into corruption at the oil company and wants to question Pence’s son. So Pence flies to Caracas and tells Guaidó he won’t get a $1 billion U.S. credit line until the prosecutor is fired. Six hours later the prosecutor begins cleaning out his desk and Pence later brags about it in an open forum at the Council on Foreign Relations. That is exactly what Biden did in Ukraine. The fired Venezuelan prosecutor then gives an affidavit under oath that Pence had him fired because he was investigating his son’s company and that the U.S. had taken over the country’s prosecutor’s office.That is exactly what the Ukrainian prosecutor testified.Nov.12, 2019From the story: The political theatrics raise several questions. For starters, will Joe Biden be investigated for mounting evidence of corruption? And why is the corporate media turning the C.I.A. “whistleblower” into a phantom in plain sight? July 31, 2023From the story: Seven years ago, the DNC email leak set Russiagate in motion. Now comes FD–1023, an F.B.I. document exposing Biden making fully corrupt use of Washington’s leverage in post-coup Ukraine.Sept. 19, 2023From the story: In the wake of Zelensky’s wildly provocative statements, it is time to question whether the U.S. president has a personal interest in prolonging the war in Ukraine. * *. *Here is a taste of what is on tap: the grilling by Republicans of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland last week on the Hunter Biden investigation, about which Amanda Devine of The New York Postwrote:
“[Garland] wants us to applaud his pathological incuriosity about the corruption of [Special Counsel xx ] Weiss’ probe, as exposed by the two valiant IRS whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler. The sort of professional, nonpartisan public servants whom Garland professes to support, they are the heroes of this sordid tale. They blew up their careers to testify about the slow-walking, the kid-glove treatment available to no other American, the tip-offs about search warrants, the constraints on investigators, the no-go zones anywhere near the Big Guy, the refusal of geolocation searches to determine whether Joe really was in the room, as Hunter claimed, in his shakedown WhatsApp to a Chinese benefactor, the burying of incriminating evidence such as the FD-1023 FBI source report alleging Hunter and Joe each took a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian oligarch, and of course, Hunter’s infamous laptop, which the FBI had authenticated and seized in December 2019, but which remained off-limits to the IRS investigators.”
We’ve Been on the Burisma Story Since 2014
As the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden ramps up, “Burisma Holdings” might well become a U.S. household name. Consortium News has been on the story for nine years.
And we plan on staying on it as a possible impeachment of Joe Biden approaches. Help us to provide coverage as we learn more about what Joe Biden was really up to in Ukraine a decade ago.
After the 2014 Coup
The U.S.-installed government in Kiev outlawed political parties, including the Communist Party, and stripped Russian as an official language. Ousted President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions was banned in several oblasts and eventually collapsed. An American citizen became finance minister and Vice President Joe Biden became Barack Obama’s virtual viceroy in Ukraine. Three months later, Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, Burisma Holdings, appointed Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors.
Videos have emerged of Biden then giving instructions to the nominal president at the time, Petro Poroshenko. By his own admission, Biden forced the resignation of Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general.
Shokin testified under oath that he was about to investigate Burisma Holdings, the company on which the vice president’s son was given a lucrative board membership just months after the U.S.-backed coup.
Biden, other U.S. officials, and the media at the time lied that Shokin was removed because he was corrupt. State Dept. memos released last year and published by Just the News actually praise Shokin for his anti-corruption work. The question of whether the leader of a foreign nation has the right to remove another country’s prosecutor was buried. With the emergence of Hunter Biden’s laptop, more lies have surfaced, such as that Joe Biden was never involved at all with Hunter’s business dealings.
Here are just a few of the many articles we’ve published starting in September 2014, seven months after the coup, when our founding editor, Bob Parry, first introduced readers to the Burisma story.
Sept. 24, 2014
From the article: “Further supporting the ‘natural gas motive’ is the fact that it was Vice President Joe Biden who demanded that President Yanukovych pull back his police on Feb. 21, a move that opened the way for the neo-Nazi militias and the U.S.-backed coup. Then, just three months later, Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, Burisma Holdings, appointed Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors.”
Sept. 26, 2019
From the story:“That’s the biggest crime in this story that isn’t being told. The illegal overthrow of a sovereign government. As booty from the coup, the sitting vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, soon got a seat on the board of Ukraine’s biggest gas producer, Burisma Holdings. This can only be seen as a transparently neocolonial maneuver to take over a country and install one’s own people.”Oct. 8, 2019
From the story: Can you imagine if the Trump administration finally succeeded in overthrowing the Venezuelan government and a couple of months later Vice President Mike Pence’s son (who wasn’t kicked out of the Navy for drug use) lands a spot on the board of a privatized Venezuelan national oil company? That is exactly what happened with Biden and his son Hunter in Ukraine.And then imagine that the U.S.-installed government of Juan Guaidó begins an investigation into corruption at the oil company and wants to question Pence’s son. So Pence flies to Caracas and tells Guaidó he won’t get a $1 billion U.S. credit line until the prosecutor is fired. Six hours later the prosecutor begins cleaning out his desk and Pence later brags about it in an open forum at the Council on Foreign Relations. That is exactly what Biden did in Ukraine. The fired Venezuelan prosecutor then gives an affidavit under oath that Pence had him fired because he was investigating his son’s company and that the U.S. had taken over the country’s prosecutor’s office.That is exactly what the Ukrainian prosecutor testified.Nov.12, 2019From the story: The political theatrics raise several questions. For starters, will Joe Biden be investigated for mounting evidence of corruption? And why is the corporate media turning the C.I.A. “whistleblower” into a phantom in plain sight? July 31, 2023From the story: Seven years ago, the DNC email leak set Russiagate in motion. Now comes FD–1023, an F.B.I. document exposing Biden making fully corrupt use of Washington’s leverage in post-coup Ukraine.Sept. 19, 2023From the story: In the wake of Zelensky’s wildly provocative statements, it is time to question whether the U.S. president has a personal interest in prolonging the war in Ukraine. * *. *Here is a taste of what is on tap: the grilling by Republicans of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland last week on the Hunter Biden investigation, about which Amanda Devine of The New York Post wrote:
“[Garland] wants us to applaud his pathological incuriosity about the corruption of [Special Counsel xx ] Weiss’ probe, as exposed by the two valiant IRS whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler. The sort of professional, nonpartisan public servants whom Garland professes to support, they are the heroes of this sordid tale. They blew up their careers to testify about the slow-walking, the kid-glove treatment available to no other American, the tip-offs about search warrants, the constraints on investigators, the no-go zones anywhere near the Big Guy, the refusal of geolocation searches to determine whether Joe really was in the room, as Hunter claimed, in his shakedown WhatsApp to a Chinese benefactor, the burying of incriminating evidence such as the FD-1023 FBI source report alleging Hunter and Joe each took a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian oligarch, and of course, Hunter’s infamous laptop, which the FBI had authenticated and seized in December 2019, but which remained off-limits to the IRS investigators.”