SPECULUM VERUM
-The day he won a seat on the Burisma Holdings board of directors, an executive urged Hunter Biden to use his influence to intercede in an investigation of the company by Ukrainian authorities.
The request in an email from Vadym Pozharskyi shows why Burisma tapped Hunter as a board member in May 2014: to use his influence as then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son to keep the energy company out of jams. That month, then-President Barack Obama made Mr. Biden his point man for shoring up Ukraine in the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s forcible seizure of Crimea.
The Pozharskyi May 12 email, among thousands of documents in Hunter’s abandoned laptop, has taken on new significance in recent months. House Oversight Committee Republicans disclosed that an informant told the FBI that Burisma executives paid $10 million in bribes to Hunter and to now-President Biden in return for various favors.
The allegation was memorialized by the FBI on a Form 1023, a fact first disclosed to the committee not by the bureau, but by a whistleblower.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has done cartwheels to conceal the document. He agreed to let committee members view a redacted version only after Republicans threatened to hold him in contempt of Congress. Mr. Wray this past week let them see two earlier 1023s that were so heavily redacted as to be were almost useless.
We know that sometime after the May 2014 email, Mr. Biden did in fact do Burisma a great favor. He pressured the government to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the company.
He told the group that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid unless Mr. Shokin was fired.
“I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the