On Tuesday morning, CIA Director John Ratcliffe shared “intelligence regarding Ukraine after determining it is in the public interest.” The 8-page redacted document, dated Dec. 2015, regards the visit from then-Vice President Joe Biden to Ukraine from Dec. 7-8 of that year.
Ukrainian officials in then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s administration “expressed bewilderment and disappointment” at Biden’s visit to Kiev.
“After the visit, these officials assessed that the Vice President of the United States has come to Kiev almost exclusively to give a generic public speech and has no intention of discussing substantive matters with Poroshenko or other officials within the Ukrainian government,” the document reads.
It goes on to say that ahead of the visit, Ukrainian officials “expected the U.S. Vice President to discuss personnel matters with Poroshenko” while he was on the ground and “had assumed that the U.S. Vice President would advocate in support or against specific officials within the Ukrainian government.”
Following the visit, which did not go as expected, “officials within the Poroshenko administration privately mused as the U.S. media scrutiny of the alleged ties of the U.S. Vice President’s family to corrupt business practices in Ukraine.”
This, the officials believed, was “evidence of a double-standard,” as Biden spoke out against corruption in Ukraine but was accused of being guilty of similar practices himself.
The speech given by Biden to the Ukrainian Rada, or Parliament, while in Kiev during that state visit, included a call for the firing of a prosecutor who was investigating Ukrainian energy giant Burisma, on whose board his son Hunter sat. Hunter Biden was paid $80,000 per month for his service.
“As the Prime Minister and the President heard me often say,” Biden told gathered officials, “I never tell another man or another nation or another woman what’s in their interest. But I can tell you, you cannot name me a single democracy in the world where the cancer of corruption is prevalent. You cannot name me one. They are thoroughly inconsistent. And it’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption.”
Hellbound and Down 