The Republican effort to slag President Joe Biden by providing false information and inaccurate claims they say proves Biden was part of a bribery scheme while service as vice president took a major hit today when the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) revealed evidence from the first impeachment of former president Donald Trump that directly refutes one of the main pillars of the GOP’s bogus claims.
NBC News reports that Raskin sent a detailed and lengthy letter to Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-KY) in which he destroyed, point by point that anyone from a Ukrainian energy firm ever had any contact with Biden.
The document, released in a letter from Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the committee’s ranking member, to its chairman, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., is a 2019 questionnaire filled out by Mykola Zlochevsky, the co-founder of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, where Biden’s son Hunter once served on the board. Zlochevsky denies ever having contacts with Joe Biden while he was vice president or receiving assistance from his staff while Hunter served on the board.
Specifically, when Zlochevsky was asked if he had ever been in contact with Biden, he emphatically denied any meetings, calls, or other communications.
When asked to detail contacts between then-Vice President Biden and his office from 2013 to 2019, Zlochevsky wrote (in all caps): “No one from Burisma ever had any contacts with VP Biden or people working for him during Hunter Biden’s engagement.” When asked whether Biden or his staff assisted Burisma in any way with business deals or meetings, he wrote, “NO.”
In the letter to Comer, Raskin notes:
“Mr. Zlochevsky’s statements are just one of the many that have debunked the corruption allegations against President Biden that were first leveled by Rudy Giuliani and have been reviewed by former President Trump’s own Justice Department.”
Additionally, Raskin makes it clear that all of the allegations against President Biden are “hearsay” that cannot be supported by facts, writing that the source behind much of the information “explicitly noted that it is not unusual for Ukrainian business executives to brag and show off and that he could not offer any opinion supporting the veracity of the allegations he was relaying.”
Rather than deal with the factual presentation made by Raskin, Comer would only say that “This unclassified record stands on its own and memorializes a confidential human source’s conversations with a Burisma executive dating back to 2015. The Burisma executive claims then-Vice President Biden solicited and received a $5 million bribe in exchange for certain actions.”
But as Raskin proved, the top executive at Burisma denies any such conversations ever took place, which is a direct repudiation of the allegations that have been made over the past several months by Comer and his eager accomplices in right-wing media who are determined to provide cover for the multiple criminal indictments that have been handed down against Trump.
