The campaign for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden admitted that it’s possible that Biden may have met with an executive for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, during his time as vice president when his son was a board member of the company.
The Biden campaign released a statement condemning reporting from the New York Post that revealed an email alleging that Biden’s son Hunter brokered a meeting between his father and Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to Burisma’s board. The campaign ruled out any official meetings between Pozharskyi and the former vice president but could not say that the two never met.
“We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told Politico. “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.”
Despite the strong condemnation, Bates could not say for certain that Vice President Biden and Pozharskyi did not meet in an informal setting, however.
As Politico reports:
Biden’s campaign would not rule out the possibility that the former VP had some kind of informal interaction with Pozharskyi, which wouldn’t appear on Biden’s official schedule. But they said any encounter would have been cursory. Pozharskyi did not respond to a request for comment.
The Daily Wire previously reported on the New York Post exclusive and its implications for former Vice President Biden:
On Wednesday, The New York Post published an April 17, 2015 email from Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, addressed to Hunter Biden and thanking him for setting up a meeting between Pozharskyi and Vice President Biden. The email was sent roughly a year after Hunter Biden had joined the board of Burisma at a reported salary of $50,000 a month and with no experience working in the energy sector.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent (sic) some time together. It’s realty (sic) an honor and pleasure,” the email says. “As we spoke yesterday evening, would be great to meet today for a quick coffee. What do you think? I could come to you (sic) office somewhere around noon or so, before or on my way to [the] airport.”
The email calls into question previous claims of ignorance made by Joe Biden about his son’s business dealings in foreign countries. In September 2019, the former vice president denied ever discussing his son’s overseas business dealings with him.
“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden told a reporter, Biden added that President Trump should be investigated for “trying to intimidate a foreign leader,” referring to a July 2019 phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
At the end of 2015, Vice President Biden, who was leading U.S. diplomatic relations with Ukraine at the time, began pushing the Ukrainian government to take action against Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was then investigating Burisma for alleged corruption. Biden went as far as withholding $1 billion-worth of U.S. aid to Ukraine until the Ukrainian Parliament voted to remove Shokin from office in March 2016.