Biden covered up Ukrainian complaints of corruption ‘double standard’, secret CIA files reveal

Ukrainian officials were left “bewildered and disappointed” by then-Vice President Joe Biden’s December 2015 trip to Kyiv, during which he gave a speech decrying corruption as a “cancer” — with the Ukrainians accusing the US of a “double standard” given Biden’s family ties to corrupt energy firm Burisma, a trove of newly declassified Obama-era intelligence reveals.

In an extreme departure from normal practice, the report on Ukrainian displeasure was suppressed at the request of Biden’s then-national security adviser, Dr. Colin Kahl, and did not appear in the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), according to a senior CIA official who briefed journalists this week.

Kahl “would strongly prefer the report not/not be disseminated,” wrote a correspondent identified only as “PDF Briefer” in an email to the CIA on February 10, 2016.

“Thanks for understanding.”

“PDF Briefer” was likely Deputy Director of National Intelligence Michael Dempsey, who provided an intelligence briefing to President Barack Obama every morning at that time. Dempsey reported to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who has been implicated in the Russiagate scandal to sabotage Donald Trump’s first presidential term. Clapper is reportedly under investigation by a federal grand jury examining the role of former Obama administration officials in concocting the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.

The PDB, the classified product of all 18 US intelligence agencies, is meant to serve as an early-warning to the commander in chief of nascent crises and looming problems across the globe.

“This was information of intelligence value that came into the possession of CIA in in late 2015,” said the senior CIA official.

“Normally … this intelligence report would be disseminated to individuals with an appropriate clearance and ‘need to know’ within the US government.

“However, in February 2016, the Vice President’s national security adviser told his intelligence briefer that he would strongly prefer the report not be disseminated. So the report never saw the light of day. “

The report and email were recently discovered during an “internal review of historical agency records and databases” ordered by CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

“As of mid-December 2015,” the eight-page report says, “officials within the administration of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko expressed bewilderment and disappointment at the 7-8 December 2015 visit of the Vice President of the United States to Kiev, Ukraine …

“These officials assessed that the U.S. Vice President had come to Kiev almost exclusively to give a generic public speech and had not had any intention of discussing substantive matters with Poroshenko or other officials within the Ukrainian government.”

After Biden left, the report goes on, the Ukrainian officials “privately mused at the U.S. media scrutiny of the alleged ties of the U.S. Vice President’s family to corrupt business practices in Ukraine [which they viewed] as evidence of a double-standard within the United States Government towards matters of corruption and political power.”

At the same time Biden, now 82, delivered his anti-corruption screed in the Ukrainian parliament, his son Hunter was receiving $1 million a year to sit on the board of Burisma.

A month before Biden’s visit, his fifth since the February 2014 Maidan revolution toppled Moscow-aligned Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a Burisma executive emailed Hunter a list of “deliverables” in return for his board compensation.

The demands included getting high-ranking US officials to put pressure on the Ukrainian government in support of Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky, who was then under investigation for corruption by Kyiv’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

“The ultimate purpose [is] to close down .. any cases/pursuits against Zlochevsky in Ukraine,” said Vadym Pozharskyi’s November 2015 email, which appears in Hunter’s abandoned laptop.

Three days before Biden landed in Kyiv, on Dec. 4, 2015, the veep joined Hunter, Zlochevsky and Pozharskyi on a speaker phone call the night of a Burisma board meeting in Dubai.

Devon Archer, Hunter’s former friend and fellow Burisma board member, testified to the House Oversight Committee in 2023 that Zlochevsky and Pozharskyi “were getting pressure and they requested Hunter help them with some of that pressure,” later clarifying that the pressure was from “Ukrainian government investigations” into Zlochevsky conducted by Shokin.

Days later, Biden threatened Poroshenko that he would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless 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 money,’” Biden boasted during a 2018 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

Shokin’s replacement, Yuriy Lutsenko, subsequently dropped all investigations into Burisma and Zlochevsky.

Newly declassified FBI source files made public last month contain allegations that two CIA officers “urged Lutsenko to stop the investigation on Zlochevsky” because the Burisma owner was “protected by the US.”

“This is extremely rare and unusual,” the senior CIA official said of the report’s suppression. “Quite frankly, it is inappropriate to go outside of the intelligence community and inquire with the White House on a dissemination of a particular report for what appears to be political reasons.

“The typical production process for intelligence reporting does not involve anyone outside of the intelligence community. “

Career CIA analysts who recently reviewed the report have concluded that it contained information “of intelligence value [and] should have been disseminated because it would have been information that would be useful and beneficial to U.S. government officials in their dealings with the Ukrainian government.

“That’s why it should have been disseminated, but it was not,” the official went on. “And therefore, policymakers were never informed of this information.

“Director Ratcliffe believes this is an example of the kind of politicization of intelligence that we need to work to eliminate in the intelligence community and for which we will have zero tolerance.”

It’s not clear from CIA records how the report was initially shared with VP Biden’s office “but it is clear that something very unusual and out of the ordinary practice occurred.”

In 2021, Kahl was nominated by then-President Biden to the key Pentagon post of undersecretary of defense for policy. During his contentious confirmation process, Republican lawmakers cited his midnight anti-Trump tweets — including one in 2020 railing against the Republican party’s “death-cult fealty to Trump“.

Another tweet by Kahl in 2024, after he had left government service for a job at Stanford University, said, “I love Joe Biden.”