WASHINGTON — Then-Vice President Joe Biden visited Ukraine on a mission to bolster the country’s energy industry days after his son Hunter joined the board of natural gas company Burisma in 2014 — which a former White House stenographer claims implicates the now-80-year-old in a foreign influence-peddling “kickback scheme.”
Mike McCormick says he was with current national security adviser Jake Sullivan — then a Biden aide — in the press cabin of Air Force Two en route to Kyiv on April 21, 2014, as he outlined how the world’s wealthiest country would help the deeply corrupt post-Soviet state build its gas industry.
Giving a rundown of priorities for the trip, Sullivan — described in a transcript as an anonymous “senior administration official” — said Biden would “discuss with [Ukrainian officials] medium- and long-term strategies to boost conventional gas production, and also to begin to take advantage of the unconventional gas reserves that are in Ukraine.”
Asked for details, the Biden aide said the US was interested in providing “technical assistance to help [Ukraine] be able to boost production in their conventional gas fields, where presently they aren’t getting the maximum of what they could be” while offering “technical assistance relating to a regulatory framework, and also the technology that would be required to extract unconventional gas resources; and Ukraine has meaningful reserves of unconventional gas according to the latest estimates.”
In December of that year, amid broader Obama administration support for Ukraine, Congress approved $50 million to support the country’s energy sector, including the natural gas industry.
McCormick, who worked more than a decade at the White House, told The Post this week he believes the timeline of events, featuring the unmasked longtime Joe Biden aide, demonstrates that the president used his prior position to help his son’s foreign business interests.
“Joe Biden was over there telling them, ‘You can’t be corrupt! You can’t be corrupt!’ while he was corrupt,” McCormick says. “Look, this is Air Force Two. This is Joe Biden’s plane. He’s in control of it. Jake Sullivan was in the front of the plane with Joe Biden in a meeting and then he walks back in the plane to talk to the press.”
Now, McCormick tells The Post that he wants to testify before the federal grand jury in Delaware considering charges against Hunter — saying he has relevant information that the FBI ignored.
“They’ve been looking at Hunter Biden, but this ties Joe Biden and [Sullivan] into promoting a kickback scheme with Ukraine,” he said. “It’s the timeline that does it.”
Hunter’s role at Burisma was not made public until a May 12, 2014, press release from the company.
A BuzzFeed article, citing company documents filed in Cyprus, said Hunter had joined Burisma on April 18 of that year and emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop include discussions in the run-up to his dad’s visit to the country.
McCormick provided The Post screenshots of an online FBI tip submission form that he says he completed in February. He has yet to hear back. Lying to the FBI is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.
“Right now, they are three years into an investigation doing nothing and it seems like they’re stonewalling,” McCormick said. “I’ll go under oath before anyone who needs to hear the truth about Joe Biden’s criminal activities.”
He added: “Joe Biden committed crimes in Ukraine in a conspiracy with Jake Sullivan. I’m a witness to that happening.”
Four days before Sullivan briefed reporters, Burisma paymaster Vadim Pozharskyi emailed Hunter’s business associate Devon Archer, already on the board, that he recognized Hunter Biden could be both an asset and a liability.
“As to the HB I do believe that we have to reach reasonable balance here. I realize fully that his role … is of long term perspective and taking into account the political weight of our Directors we have to ‘use’ their personality carefully and strategically wise, I do realize their vulnerability in this respect,” Pozharskyi wrote.
“Therefore I kindly suggest to indeed now or after his father left our country just put him on our website without going for public camping [sic],” he added. “And then after we meet in May we agree on joint plan and move forward accordingly, with media campaign or without it, just concentrating on informal talks with relevant interested parties etc.
“In some sense we cannot ‘hide’ our directors.”
Pozharskyi went on: “Please have a thought about it before tomorrow phone call, it’s just my ideas now as I have not yet talked to [Burisma owner] Nikolay [Zlochevsky]. (we both traveling now and do not use mobile phones for such conversations-)).”
Hunter Biden was paid up to $1 million per year from 2014 through 2019 to serve on Burisma’s board, despite no relevant industry experience, as his dad handled the Obama administration’s Ukraine portfolio.
“Hunter Biden had no credentials to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company other than his last name being ‘Biden,'” said House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), who is leading a congressional inquiry into Joe Biden’s role in his relatives’ foreign business ventures.
“The fact that then-Vice President Joe Biden pushed natural gas production in Ukraine days after his son was appointed to the board of Burisma reeks of corruption,” Comer told The Post.
Fourth-ranking House Republican Elise Stefanik (R-NY) added, “House Republicans are leading the charge in shining a light into the corrupt and illegal dealings of the Biden Crime Family.”
“The American people now know that Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings have compromised Joe Biden,” she said.
“The truth is coming out, and I am committed to ensuring that the entire Biden Crime Family is held accountable for compromising our national security.”
The FBI and the US Attorney’s Office in Delaware did not respond to requests for comment.
Sullivan’s office did not dispute McCormick’s claim that he was the unnamed “senior administration official” who briefed reporters on the flight to Kyiv, which happened about two months after pro-Western protesters ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych.
A spokesperson for Sullivan referred The Post to another White House spokesperson who did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Attorneys for Hunter Biden also did not respond to inquiries.
The 80-year-old commander-in-chief is reportedly not a focus of the wide-ranging probe into the first son — though at least one witness before the Delaware grand jury was asked about the identity of the “big guy” described in a May 2017 email as due a 10% cut in a Chinese energy venture.
The US Attorney’s Office in Delaware reportedly is investigating Hunter Biden for possible tax fraud, illegal foreign lobbying, money laundering and lying about his drug use on a federal gun purchase form.
Hunter Biden last year paid about $2 million in back taxes in a bid to avoid prosecution, though doing so does not legally absolve him of the original non-payment.
McCormick says he suspects Hunter and Joe Biden met before the then-vice president’s trip to Europe and may have discussed Burisma.
The then-second son emailed Archer a lengthy analysis of developments in Ukraine on April 12, 2014, stoking suspicions about whether he somehow gained access to privileged official assessments.
“A grand jury is an investigative tool. So they can go to the Secret Service, and they can subpoena the Secret Service and say, ‘We want to see where Joe Biden was on the 12th. We want to see where Hunter Biden was on the 12th,'” McCormick said.
The former stenographer, who also is a book and Substack author, openly acknowledges that he supports the 2024 candidacy of former President Donald Trump.
He also speculates that Hunter Biden may be linked to classified documents that were recovered last year at the president’s Wilmington, Del., home.
“That may feed into … the document storage, because if he, if Hunter was at his dad’s house where these documents were found, on the day he wrote this email, that’s a pretty serious part of an investigation that puts Joe in the middle of handing off these documents to his son for illegal use,” McCormick said.
Hunter Biden wrote in documents retrieved from his laptop that he paid as much as “half” of his income to his father.
The FBI in December 2019 took possession of the now-53-year-old’s abandoned laptop, which contained a trove of communications detailing Joe Biden’s interactions with his son’s Chinese, Kazakhstani, Mexican, Russian and Ukrainian business associates — contradicting his campaign-trail claims to have never discussed with Hunter or first brother James Biden their overseas business dealings.
At an April 16, 2015, dinner at DC’s Cafe Milano, then-VP Biden joined his son and a small group including Pozharskyi, who emailed Hunter Biden the next day to thank him for “giving an opportunity to meet your father.” The note formed the basis of The Post’s first bombshell report in October 2020 on documents from the first son’s laptop.
Former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and his wife, Yelena Baturina, who sought out property investments with Hunter Biden, and a trio of Kazakhstani business associates also made the guest list.
Baturina and another oligarch who sought out American real estate with Hunter Biden, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, are among the dwindling list of Russian elites not yet sanctioned by President Biden in response to last year’s invasion of Ukraine by Moscow.
The White House has said Biden stands by his claims that he has “never spoken” with his son about “his overseas business dealings” and that “I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses.”
