Left-wing fact-checkers are at it again, playing defense for Joe Biden and insisting that there’s no “there” there regarding the allegations that Burisma founder and CEO Mykola Zlochevsky was coerced by Joe and Hunter Biden to pay them each a $5 million bribe, according to an FD-1023 form.
Snopes, for example, dismissed the details FD-1023 form, insisting it “provides little new insight outside of confirming what was already reported by Grassley in May 2023” and dismisses the allegations as “second-hand hearsay.”
But a look at the available evidence says otherwise.
The informant was a reliable source for the FBI.
While the identity of the informant is still classified, we do know that he is a longtime informant for the bureau, who has been a credible source for over a decade and has been paid six figures. It’s really difficult to dismiss the accusations of a longtime reliable informant by the FBI as mere hearsay.
The FBI tried to cover up the existence of recordings.
According to the document, Zlochevsky has 17 recordings of conversations, 15 with Hunter Biden and two with Joe Biden, that he reportedly kept as an insurance policy. When the FBI first provided a copy of the FD-1023 form — only after the House Oversight Committee threatened FBI Director Christopher Wray with contempt — mention of the existence of the recordings was redacted. If no bribes took place, then these recordings would either not exist or be completely innocuous, and there’d be no reason to keep this information from the committee.
Biden bragged about getting Shokin fired.
The CHS says that Zlochevsky was to pay the Bidens $5 million each in exchange for Joe Biden pressuring the Ukrainian government to dismiss prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the company for corruption.
We know that Joe Biden played his role in the transaction, not only because Shokin was, in fact, fired but also because Biden publicly bragged about how he pressured then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko by using a $1 billion loan from the Obama Administration as leverage to get Shokin fired.
“I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor [Shokin]. And they didn’t,” Biden recalled back in 2018. “So they said they had — they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to — or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, ‘You have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said — I said, call him. I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a b*tch. He got fired.”
The Bidens received payments from Burisma.
Despite having zero experience in the energy sector, Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma from the time Joe Biden became the Obama administration’s point man on U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine in 2014 until April 2019 and was reportedly making $83,000 per month.
According to IRS agent Joseph Ziegler, Burisma also made $7.3 million in payments over the years to the various Biden family businesses starting in 2014, and Hunter and business associates also reportedly received another $6.5 million.
In the end, we have a reliable source, an accusation of a bribe in exchange for a service, a service that was performed, and evidence of payments made. Snopes simply can’t write off the allegations as mere “second-hand hearsay.”
