A newly declassified memo shows that then-Vice President Joe Biden’s office intervened to prevent the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from circulating a 2016 intelligence report detailing how top Ukrainian officials viewed his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings in the country.
The report, released Tuesday by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, compiled reactions from senior Ukrainian leaders following Biden’s December 2015 trip to Kyiv. It revealed that Ukrainian officials were concerned about what they described as the Biden family’s “corrupt” business ties, but Biden sought to keep the assessment under wraps.
“I just spoke with VP/NSA and he would strongly prefer the report not/not be disseminated … Thanks for understanding,” the vice president’s Presidential Daily Brief briefer, whose name was redacted, wrote to the CIA, according to the memo.
During the 2015 visit, Biden pressured then-President Petro Poroshenko to fire the country’s top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees unless Shokin was dismissed. At the time, Shokin’s office was investigating Burisma — the Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden served on the board.
Officials within Poroshenko’s administration “privately mused” about U.S. media coverage of Hunter Biden’s business ties and saw them as evidence of a “double standard” in Washington’s approach to corruption, according to the report.
“These officials viewed the alleged ties of the U.S. Vice President’s family to corruption in Ukraine as evidence of a double-standard within the United States Government towards matters of corruption and political power,” the intelligence report states.
Intelligence officials determined that the information met the criteria for dissemination at the time it was collected, but it was withheld from distribution at the request of the Vice President’s office, a CIA official told Fox News Digital.
Ukrainian officials also “expressed bewilderment and disappointment” at Biden’s visit, noting that he seemed to have come to Kyiv “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,” according to the report.
A senior CIA official said it was “extremely rare and unusual” and “inappropriate to go outside of the intelligence community and inquire with the White House on the dissemination of a particular report for what appears to be political reasons,” according to Fox News Digital.
The information cited in the report was gathered in December 2015 and compiled into an assessment in 2016.
The CIA did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment, while Biden could not be reached.
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