Last week, Devon Archer laid out the real story about the firing of the Ukrainian Prosecutor Viktor Shokin, blowing up the Democratic spin on the issue and confirming that the folks at Burisma considered Shokin a “threat.”
Archer described him as “taking a close look at Burisma” and being more “case active than a U.S. attorney general,” hence why the “signals are more important.” Archer said that there were allegations that some of the company’s deposits were not “authentically acquired.” This was what law firms and “strategic advisory firms” were hired for, to handle these kinds of things, Archer said. [….]
But “Shokin was considered a threat” to the business, Archer confirmed, noting that he had seized assets of Zlochevsky, as we have reported in the past. Archer described how Zlochevsky never returned to Ukraine after his assets were seized.
Archer noted how there was all this pressure to fire Shokin and agreed that Biden was part of that pressure.
Shokin has also confirmed that in the past, including in an interview from 2020 that we reported on last week. He also laid out how he had been investigating Burisma and as we have reported for years, that they had seized the assets of Burisma co-founder Mykola Zlochevsky. He believed that Joe Biden pressured him to be fired because he wasn’t backing down on Burisma.
Then as Archer said, after Shokin was fired, Burisma was “let off the hook.”
There are two intriguing bits of information about the replacement guy, Yuriy (Yuri) Lutsenko.
According to emails one of the things that Hunter Biden helped to do from Burisma was to bring in Blue Star Strategies in 2015 to help in the cause to “close down any cases/pursuits” against Zlochevesky. Hunter said that he trusted the co-founders of Blue Star “implicitly, so I believe we are all aligned.”
But it turns out that Painter had a connection to Lutsenko.
Internal State Department emails from 10 months later suggest Painter told the State Department that, at the time, she was also representing Lutsenko.
George Kent, at the time a high-level State Department official focused on Eurasian affairs, complained to other high-level State Department officials that Painter had effectively bullied him in a phone call regarding Lutsenko, the Shokin replacement.
Painter told Kent, according to a September 2016 email, that “she had represented Lutsenko’s interests in the US for five years.” That meant Painter, who Hunter Biden brought in to help shield Burisma from legal scrutiny, was claiming to have been simultaneously representing the prosecutor who replaced Shokin after Shokin was fired.
In the same email, Kent went on to note that Blue Star Strategies, Painter’s company, had offered to connect Lutsenko with Hillary Clinton’s team; at the time, most political operatives believed Clinton was weeks away from winning the presidency.
“Blue Star had promised they could arrange access to high levels of the Clinton campaign,” Kent said Lutsenko had told him.
Indeed, Blue Star was able to get at least one meeting with Lutsenko, which they reportedly weren’t able to do with Shokin, which would seem to indicate that he was more open to their blandishments.
Yet that wasn’t the only intriguing question of Yuriy Lutsenko.
In 2019, we covered how Lutsenko purportedly wanted to come to the U.S. and dish the dirt to Attorney General Bill Barr about this matter, but nobody was responding to him. Among the things he supposed had to offer was evidence about $3 million that went to accounts tied to Hunter Biden. He also allegedly had records that Joe Biden allegedly pressured Burisma and that Burisma planned to interview Hunter Biden. Shokin also talked about the possibility of such an interview with Hunter in that 2020 interview I mentioned above.
In May, we reported on additional information about Lutsenko’s offer, and how the DOJ allegedly sat on it.
Bud Cummins, a former federal prosecutor, first reported the bribery allegations to then-New York US Attorney Geoff Berman on Oct. 4, 2018, in an email claiming he had evidence that Joe Biden had “exercised influence to protect” his son’s Ukrainian employer “in exchange for payments to Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, and Joe Biden.”
In the email obtained by John Solomon’s Just The News, Cummins said that Ukraine’s then-Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko wanted to travel to the United States to meet Berman, and could produce two “John Doe” witnesses to corroborate his claims about the Bidens.
But Berman never responded to the email.
Sounds like there’s another witness that the House Oversight Committee might want to be having a little conversation with about all this.