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Joe Biden pushed for Ukraine to frack the gas during his 2014 vice presidential visit — just days after his son Hunter joined the board of a company set to profit from it.
The first son joined the board of directors of the corrupt Ukrainian gas company Burisma on April 18, 2014, the company announced in a press release at the time.
Three days later, Joe was aboard Air Force One for an official visit to the eastern European country.
One of his senior officials briefed reporters on board that the vice president was pushing “medium and long-term strategies to boost conventional gas production, as well as to begin tapping into Ukraine’s existing unconventional gas reserves.”
Joe Biden visited Ukraine as vice president on April 21, 2014, to push for increased energy production, just three days after his son Hunter joined the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Pictured in Kiev with former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk in 2014
Biden’s drive to increase energy production has proven to be a lucrative move for his son’s company Burisma, which has generated at least $400 million in revenue.
The president’s current national security adviser, Jake Sullivan (pictured in Kiev in November), was the senior official who briefed reporters on Biden’s trip at the time.
The “unconventional” reserves were a reference to fracking, a method of gas extraction for which Burisma was one of the few companies in Ukraine with a license at the time.
The official said that Joe promised assistance to Ukrainian energy companies from American experts.
Biden’s push to increase energy production was politically significant – making Ukraine more economically independent from Russia. But the move also resulted in millions of dollars being paid to the company his son was working for at the time.
According to Burisma’s website, it increased production from 100mcm in 2010 to 1.3bcm in 2018 – when it brought in revenues of at least $400m, according to Reuters estimates.
In 2019, Burisma obtained 35 hydrocarbon production licenses in Ukraine’s major oil and gas basins.
According to energy industry publication KeyFactsEnergy.com, it began using hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracturing, in 2016 and by May 2019 had used the technology in 10% of its wells.
A Burisma executive explained how the company benefited from the help of American expertise in Ukraine, in a 2017 interview with the Ukrainian trade publication Nefterynok.
White House stenographer Mike McCormick said he was on Air Force One when Sullivan showed reporters about Biden’s 2014 flight.
Burisma has partnered with U.S. hydraulic fracturing companies Schlumberger and ProPetro Services in Ukraine, allowing it to grow the country’s “largest modern drilling fleet,” Taras Bordini, the head of country operations, said, three years after Biden intervened.
Mike McCormick, the White House stenographer who was on Air Force Flight 2 in April 2014, told DailyMail.com that the anonymous “senior official” who gave the briefing was Jake Sullivan, who is now President Biden’s national security advisor.
“Essentially our job was to record everything that was said to the press, or confront the public, and very quickly prepare transcripts that the White House could release,” McCormick said.
The trip was on April 21st, Easter Monday. We flew from the capital to Ukraine on Air Force One. My job was to sit in the back with the reporters, with a tape recorder and microphone in case there was a press release.
Sullivan came back and briefly acted as a “high-ranking official in the administration.” They wanted to publish what he said, and they weren’t afraid of him. But as a senior official in the administration, there is no name associated with him.
He talked about what Joe would do with Ukraine’s energy security.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden was captured shaking hands with Ambassador to Ukraine Jeffrey R.
Briefing transcripts show Sullivan was only identified as a “senior administrative official” to avoid having a name “attached to him”.
Sullivan’s comments were reported, as an anonymous official, in several outlets at the time including NPR and Reuters.
“(Biden) will talk about the short- and long-term energy situation in Ukraine,” Text He says.
When he arrives, there will also be a team on the ground from the United States, a team of experts working on the backflow issue.
This team will be in Kiev, and then also travel to Slovakia, Poland and Hungary to help tackle the issue of reversing the flow of natural gas to provide Ukraine with some measure of short-term supply of natural gas as they look to replenish their resources. Stores.
“But he will also discuss with them medium and long-term strategies to boost conventional gas production, as well as start tapping into unconventional gas reserves that are in Ukraine.”
Nothing seemed right at the time — but that was before Hunter’s relationship with Burisma was publicly revealed, said McCormick, a conservative author who has written a book about Joe Biden.
At the time, it looked pretty good. No one on the plane knew that Hunter had already signed up to be with Burisma. This will not be publicly announced for another three weeks in mid-May.
“Now that I’m looking at Hunter’s laptop, I realize Sullivan was telling the press we were going to help Ukraine’s fracking industry.
Burisma Holdings was one of the only companies licensed to do hydraulic fracturing in Ukraine. And Joe Biden would have known that.
It is unclear if Biden received specific briefings on Burisma before his trip to Ukraine in April. But the then vice president was tasked with handling relations with Ukraine, and focused his trip on pushing for energy independence in the country.
Biden has repeatedly denied discussing foreign business deals with his son.
Vice President Joe Biden at a meeting with Ukrainian lawmakers, April 22, 2014. At the time, the vice president was also promising assistance to Ukrainian energy companies from American experts, a White House official said.
The president, pictured with Hunter in August 2022, has repeatedly denied discussing foreign business deals with his son
A general view of the Burisma Group building in Kyiv in October 2019
The vice president’s trip to Ukraine was announced on April 12, 2020, after Hunter was already in talks to join Burisma’s board of directors and was discussing energy deals involving the company, his emails reveal.
Hunter emailed his business partner and fellow Burisma board member Devon Archer on April 22, 2014 with an excerpt from a news story quoting Joe Biden talking about Ukraine’s need to increase its gas production, and offering U.S. help to do so.
Archer replied, “We need to make sure that the provisional government in Ukraine realizes the value of Burisma in its existence.”
“You have to send to Vadim (Pozharsky, Burisma executive) — it makes it look like we’re adding value,” Hunter said.
A September 2020 report on Hunter’s suspicious dealings with Ukraine and China by the Senate Homeland Security Committee called Burisma a “corrupt Ukrainian gas company” and said State Department officials viewed its owner Mykola Zlochevsky as an “odious oligarch”.
“In 2016, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, conducted an active and ongoing investigation into Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky,” the report said. The report indicated that the FBI was also assisting MI5 in a case against Zlochevsky for “seizing corrupt assets”, according to Jeffrey Pyatt, then US ambassador to Ukraine.
The Republican-controlled FBI and House committees are currently investigating Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine, for alleged tax crimes, illegal foreign lobbying and money laundering.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said he is investigating whether Joe knew about or even benefited from Hunter’s work for Ukrainian and Chinese companies.
In addition to hiring Hunter, Burisma also paid former Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski 1 million euros (about $1 million) to join its board as of January 2014.
McCormick referred to Biden’s public comments he blogged during a trip to Poland in March 2014, revealing a possible close relationship between Kwaśniewski and the then vice president.
According to a White House transcript from a joint press conference with Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski on March 18, 2014 at the Presidential Palace in Warsaw, Biden told the Polish prime minister: “There is a Polish knight’s sword given to me by your predecessor, by your government, that hangs proudly in my family home.”
The comment could refer to Kwasniewski, who served as president from 1995 to 2005. He was succeeded by Lech Kaczynski. Komorowski assumed power after Kaczynski’s death in 2010.
Biden was required to report a large gift such as a ceremonial sword on the State Department’s annual registry of foreign gifts.
But no such gift appears in records between 2014 and 1999, the year the first report was issued on the Federal Register website.
The only Polish sword on record was handed over in June 2009 by General Franciszek Jagor to Pentagon Admiral Michael Mullen, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen turned it over to GSA officials.
However, Kaczyński gave Biden a 14-karat white gold ballpoint pen worth $580 in October 2009.
Joe Biden pushed for fracking in Ukraine days after Hunter joined Burisma’s board