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Senator Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican who runs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, says it’s time to get to the bottom of the Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scheme that played a key role in the failed impeachment of President Trump.
Johnson, multiple news reports say, will seek a committee vote to subpoena records connected to Hunter Biden and his work for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Ukraine’s top prosecutor was probing the company for corruption when then-Vice President Joe Biden strong-armed the country to fire the prosecutor. Hunter Biden was on Burisma’s board of directors.
Thus, Johnson’s subpoena, the target of which is not only documents but also a Ukrainian diplomat who worked for a Democrat consulting firm that had a very big client: Burisma Holdings.
Biden senior, who heads into today’s primaries after a stunning victory over rival Bernie Sanders in South Carolina, has repeatedly said neither he nor Hunter did anything wrong in connection with Burisma.
Skeptics aren’t so sure, given the timing of the elder Biden’s move to pink-slip the prosecutor.
Johnson’s Move
Johnson notified committee members that he will schedule a meeting to vote on the subpoena for documents, Politico reported yesterday.
“The subpoena seeks records from Blue Star, a Democratic public affairs firm,” the webzine reported. “Johnson cited government documents indicating that the firm ‘sought to leverage Hunter Biden’s role as a board member of Burisma to gain access to, and potentially influence matters at, the State Department.’”
Not surprisingly, Democrats oppose the subpoena because “there is no evidence to buttress the allegations that Biden or his son did anything wrong related to Hunter’s role on the board of Burisma.”
That claim is consonant with the leftist media’s refrain during Trump’s impeachment that Biden-Burisma is a “debunked conspiracy theory.”
Johnson’s letter says Blue Star consultant Andrii Telizhenko, a former top diplomat for Ukraine, “provided some documents to the committee, but added that Telizhenko was barred from turning over some of the information due to his non-disclosure agreement with Blue Star.”
“Blocking the receipt of relevant records, and any committee member voting against this subpoena would be doing, only heightens the risks of ‘disinformation’ because the committee would not have access to all pertinent information,” Johnson wrote.
Telizhenko, who has made unsubstantiated allegations of coordination between the Democratic National Committee and the Ukrainian government in 2016, met with Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani earlier this year to discuss “Ukrainian collusion” with Democrats during the election.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that Johnson also wants to subpoena Telizhenko. “Obtaining Mr. Telizhenko’s Blue Star documents and information is an important part of this investigation, Johnson wrote,” the newspaper reported.
Biden’s backers undoubtedly see the timing of Johnson’s request as a move to discredit the presidential candidate just as he appears poised to move on Bernie Sanders, the incipient totalitarian poised to seize control of the Democrat Party.
In an interview Monday night, Johnson denied that Biden’s win sparked his subpoena request, noting that “we’d still be asking for the same information” regardless of Biden’s status as a Democratic presidential candidate.
“My oversight is not directed toward Joe Biden or Hunter Biden,” Johnson said. “It’s these issues — it just so happens that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden are also wrapped up and connected to the whole Ukrainian issue.”
What Telizhenko Might Say
Understandably, Democrats are terrified about what Telizhenko might reveal.
“Telizhenko is a 29-year-old Ukrainian national who has fueled the widely debunked theory embraced by Trump that Ukraine assisted former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election with help from the Democratic National Committee, the Post reported. “The DNC has denied those claims.”
But that theory is not “widely debunked,” as reporter John Solomon has shown.
When Telizhenko was a political officer at the Ukrainian embassy, he says, superiors ordered him to help a DNC cutout, Alexandra Chalupa, gather dirt on then-candidate Trump and campaign aide Paul Manafort. The goal, Telizhenko told Solomon, was to force Trump out of the race against Clinton.
Nor is Biden-Burisma “debunked.”
On Saturday, the Washington Examiner reported that “Ukrainian investigators have begun an inquiry into then-Vice President Joe Biden over allegations that he pressured officials into firing a top prosecutor in 2016.”
But whether Biden pressured Ukraine into firing Viktor Shokin is not just an “allegation.” Biden bragged about forcing him out by threatening to withhold financial assistance to the country. At the time, Shokin was probing Burisma, which had enriched Hunter Biden and placed him on its board despite his record as a raging drug addict and his lack of experience in energy.
A Burisma board member confessed in November that the company hired Hunter Biden because of his last name.
Trump’s impeachment began after he asked Ukraine’s president, during a phone call on July 25, to probe Biden-Burisma. An anti-Trump Ukrainian-born Army officer working at the National Security Council leaked details about the conversation to a hate-Trump CIA bureaucrat, who, in turn, was connected to the DNC-Ukraine conspiracy to sink Trump in 2016.
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
