A crest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation inside the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 3, 2007. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
Commentary
We now know with certainty that the FBI actively worked to alter the outcome of a U.S. presidential election.
As the larger ramifications of their actions are being digested, some additional questions come to mind. How did the FBI know the New York Post was about to run a story on the laptop? Was the FBI’s cover-up of Hunter Biden’s laptop also related to President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial? And why is it that the FBI had a physical office located within Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau since June 2016?
And finally the big question: Was the subsequent FBI investigation of Hunter Biden designed to actually protect him and his father, President Joe Biden—and, perhaps more importantly, protect the FBI?
In a letter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) recently disclosed that whistleblowers alerted him that “FBI officials intentionally undermined efforts to investigate Hunter Biden.”
Johnson noted that after the FBI obtained the laptop, “local FBI leadership told employees, ‘You will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop.’”
The supposed reason given for this inaction? The FBI was “not going to change the outcome of the election again,” which is certainly some strange logic to use, because by choosing not to investigate the Hunter Biden laptop, the FBI did, in fact, directly affect the outcome of an election.
But as we now know, the truth is far worse than Johnson’s letter indicates. During a now-infamous interview with Joe Rogan, co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms Mark Zuckerberg casually admitted that the FBI approached Facebook—just before the New York Post broke its story on the Hunter laptop—warning of a pending dump of Russian disinformation.
Bear in mind that the New York Post story broke in October 2020. The FBI had physical possession of the laptop since at least December 2019—almost a full 11 months—and they had likely seen the device’s data several months earlier when they were contacted in July 2019 by the computer shop that first had the laptop. The FBI knew for a fact the laptop was real.
These revelations come on the heels of a multitude of allegations leveled by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), including that “FBI officials sought to falsely portray as disinformation evidence … that provided the FBI derogatory information related to Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities, even though some of that information had already been or could be verified.”
Grassley also disclosed “tampering by senior FBI and Justice Department officials in politically sensitive investigations [including] election and campaign finance probes across multiple election cycles.” To make matters even worse, in August 2020, the FBI endeavored to label an investigation by Grassley and Johnson as “advancing Russian disinformation.”
In response to Zuckerberg’s admission, the FBI later issued what was essentially a non-denial denial statement, saying they “can only alert a private entity of a potential threat, not require it to take action.” The FBI’s choice of Facebook is perhaps not that surprising, given that Zuckerberg had given more than $400 million to influence the 2020 election in favor of Biden.
Note that the FBI used the word “threat” to describe Hunter Biden’s laptop—which the FBI had held for 11 months—and knew with certainty that it was real. The only “threat” posed by the laptop was to Joe Biden’s candidacy for president, since it held emails confirming that he shut down the investigation into Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani had been leading the charge in investigating the laptop. Notably, Giuliani also has been the subject of a federal investigation that may have begun as early as 2018.
Additionally, a number of people with whom Giuliani was working have been targeted by the Treasury Department. We know that Giuliani had been looking into Ukrainian corruption and interference in our elections. We also know that Giuliani had physical possession of the data from the laptop since at least August 2020—the same time in which the FBI tried to discredit Grassley’s investigation—and Giuliani was providing information on it to the New York Post.
Giuliani’s knowledge of the laptop actually went back more than a year earlier, to July 2019, and he likely saw much of the contents before he got a full copy.
July 2019 is the same exact time that the FBI was made aware of the laptop. Notably, July 25, 2019, marked the date of Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s new president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It was during this call that Trump told Zelenskyy that he would like him to speak with Giuliani and then-Attorney General Bill Barr, saying, “I will ask him to call you along with the attorney general. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy.”
It was this phone call that paved the way for the 2019 impeachment of Trump—and it now appears that the FBI’s coverup of Hunter Biden’s laptop also directly affected the impeachment hearings of Trump.
Trump was impeached by the Democrat-controlled House on Dec. 18, 2019. The Senate later found Trump to be innocent of the charges and declined to convict him. One of the primary charges leveled by the left was that Trump “corruptly solicited the Government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations into” Joe Biden in order to create false and damaging narratives.
An examination of the actual phone transcript shows a somewhat different story.
The Ukraine Connection
Trump told Zelenskyy that “there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution” of Burisma owner Nikolay Zlochevsky “and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”
Trump’s claims were factually correct. As vice president, Biden demanded the removal of Ukrainian prosecutor Victor Shokin by Petro Poroshenko, who at the time was Ukraine’s president. And the details behind Biden’s demand resided on the younger Biden’s laptop. Joe Biden famously bragged about this incident at a conference he attended in 2019, telling conference participants that he told Poroshenko: “Petro, you’re not getting your billion dollars. It’s OK, you can keep the prosecutor general. Just understand—we’re not paying if you do.”
Biden left a few facts out of the story he related in 2019. Shokin had been investigating Burisma, where Hunter Biden was a board member. Shokin had been brought back from retirement to clean up corruption in Ukraine’s prosecutor’s office and he appeared to excel in this new role.
Victoria Nuland, President Barack Obama’s then-assistant secretary of state, personally wrote to Shokin in June 2015, telling him, “We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government.” Nuland, who is now Biden’s undersecretary of state, also said that the ongoing reform from Shokin enabled him to “investigate and prosecute corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair, and transparent manner.”
Nuland’s letter was never shown at Trump’s 2020 impeachment, nor was it released to Trump’s defense team. Nor was the damning Nov. 2, 2015, email on Hunter Biden’s laptop from the head of Burisma’s board, Vadym Pozharskyi. That email, which also wasn’t shown during Trump’s impeachment, tasked Hunter Biden with producing “deliverables,” stating that the “ultimate purpose” was to “close down any cases or pursuits” against Burisma’s Zlochevsky in Ukraine.
Pozharskyi’s target was Shokin, who had reopened an investigation into Zlochevsky that had been shut down by his predecessor in late 2014, after Burisma’s owner had allegedly paid a $7 million bribe to the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office.
The same day that Pozharskyi emailed Hunter Biden about closing the investigation into Zlochevsky, the younger Biden reached out to Amos Hochstein, Obama’s special envoy and coordinator of international energy affairs.
Hunter Biden then met with Hochstein in person four days later, on Nov. 6, 2015. The timing of the younger Biden’s outreach, occurring within hours of receiving Pozharskyi’s instructions, is notable. Hochstein later told congressional investigators that Hunter Biden “wanted to know my views on Burisma and Zlochevsky.” Nuland later told congressional investigators that Hochstein personally conveyed his concerns about Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma to then-Vice President Joe Biden during a flight to Ukraine on Dec. 7, 2015.
Earlier that year, Pozharskyi had “spent some time” with Joe Biden in Washington in a meeting that had been brokered by Hunter Biden. Now, Pozharskyi appeared to be leveraging not only Hunter Biden, but his meeting with Joe Biden. Less than three weeks after Hunter Biden received Pozharskyi’s email, Joe Biden issued his first demand that Shokin be removed.
After Poroshenko failed to comply with the demands, Biden leveraged that $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer loan guarantees to force Shokin’s removal. Shokin was finally removed in March 2016. By the time Joe Biden left office in January 2017, all investigations into Burisma had been closed.
At the time the alleged bribe was paid in 2014 to Shokin’s predecessor, Vitaly Yarema, Hunter Biden wasn’t just a Burisma board member, but also the head of Burisma’s legal unit. A recently released 2016 email from State Department official George Kent states that Burisma had paid the $7 million bribe to end the initial 2014 corruption investigation.
That investigation had reached all the way to London, where UK courts had frozen $23 million in Burisma assets. After the bribe was paid, the Ukrainian prosecutor suddenly wrote to the London court to say that the matter was closed. The frozen $23 million in assets was then released to Burisma’s Zlochevsky. Kent would later testify at Trump’s impeachment hearings, but curiously, never mentioned the explosive information from his email during Trump’s impeachment.
There’s another element to this story as well. In October 2014, Ukraine established the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) in response to pressure from the International Monetary Fund and assistance from then-Vice President Joe Biden.
On Jan. 22, 2016, NABU Director Artem Sytnyk announced that his bureau was very close to signing a memorandum of cooperation with the FBI—and by February 2016, the FBI had a permanent representative onsite at NABU offices.
A few months later, on June 30, 2016, NABU and the FBI entered into a memorandum of understanding that allowed for an FBI office onsite at NABU offices. NABU has repeatedly refused to make the memorandum with the FBI public and went to court in 2018 to prevent its release.
In December 2017, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who would later work with Giuliani, accused Sytnyk of allowing the FBI to conduct illegal operations in Ukraine, claiming that the FBI was “invited without the permission required and in breach of the necessary procedures.”
Taras Chornovil, a Ukrainian political analyst, also questioned the FBI’s activities, writing: “Some kind of undercover operations are being conducted in Ukraine with direct participation (or even under control) of the FBI. This means the FBI operatives could have access to classified data or confidential information.”
This arrangement makes the FBI’s decision in late 2019 to halt any investigative activity into Hunter Biden’s laptop all the more notable, as they were almost certainly already aware of much of the information contained on the device’s hard drive.
With all of these details in mind, it’s hardly surprising that the FBI quietly began an investigation of Hunter Biden—one that was disclosed by Hunter Biden himself shortly after the 2020 election had ended—and after the FBI had directed Facebook to censor stories on the laptop as Russia disinformation. What better way to protect not only Joe and Hunter Biden, but also the bureau itself?
Watch the full episode of Truth Over News on this topic on Thursday, Sept. 2.