In part 1 of this mini-series within a series (the prequel covered COVID, we’ll wrap with Gaza), I covered the post-Cold War years when Joe Biden ran point in the US Senate under the Clinton and Bush 2 administrations.
In part 2, I covered Joe’s misleadership role as Vice President up to the success of the Maidan Coup in 2014.
And this bad boy is going to finish out Biden’s term as VP, during which his portfolio included a nearly free hand in Ukraine because Obama was busy hanging out with Jay Z or some shit.
It’s too bad, because Obama seems to have been one of the few decision-makers in his administration with anything approaching a clear-eyed view of the situation.
In early 2016, Obama was quoted by The Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg in a piece entitled “The Obama Doctrine”:
Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.
“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” (Obama) said.
I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.
“It’s realistic,” he said. “But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some ambiguity.”
… “There is no evidence in modern American foreign policy that that’s how people respond. People respond based on what their imperatives are, and if it’s really important to somebody, and it’s not that important to us, they know that, and we know that,” (Obama) said. “There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not. Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years.”
I realize that’s chicken feed compared to the vast sums Biden would pour into the Ukrainian black hole, but it was big money in its day. Back before RussiaGate when most Americans agreed with Obama’s 2012 remark that “the 1980s called, they want their foreign policy back” in response to Mitt Romney declaring Russia “our #1 foreign policy challenge”
Despite presiding over the beginning of the Ukrainian Civil War from 2014 on, Obama’s term was seen as time wasted by true freedom-loving patriots like The Atlantic Council’s Adrian Karatnycky, who wrote the following for Foreign Policy in 2023:
Obama’s Russia policy, including his embrace of the doctrine of Kremlin escalation dominance, has continued to shape U.S. policy during the Trump and Biden administrations. Although Donald Trump behaved badly toward Ukraine by trying to enlist Kyiv in his efforts to weaken presidential rival Joe Biden, he greenlighted the shipment of Javelin anti-tank weapons in 2017 and 2019. Nonetheless, years of fierce debate merely over sending Javelins stifled discussion of other weapons needed by Ukraine, including air and missile defense, battle tanks, fighter jets, and long-range missiles. These could have made Ukraine more secure before 2022, and some of them are still not in Ukraine’s arsenal today.
To his credit, Biden advocated arming Ukraine with defensive weapons when he was vice president under Obama. But when he became president himself, Biden brought many of the architects of Obama’s timid approach to Russia back into the government. As a result of their influence, from the moment in the fall of 2021 when the U.S. government knew Putin was planning to invade to the start of the invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the United States lost a crucial window in which to provide Ukraine significant new weapons and the training to use them. Instead of much-needed howitzers, tanks, multiple-launch rocket systems (such as HIMARS), and heavy ordnance, Washington doled out modest assistance enabling not much more than partisan resistance.
But that’s enough about what Biden couldn’t do as Obama’s VP; let’s look at what he and the policies he backed did do to land Ukraine and the EU in deep doo-doo.
If It’s 2014, That Must Be Crimea Seceding
There’s no way to discuss the events of 2014 without taking a bracing dip into the Black Sea waters surrounding that most strategic of peninsulas, Crimea.
Yeah, yeah, the official Western narrative is that Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine under military pressure from Putin in a patently rigged vote.
And it does seem to be true that the Crimean parliament voted 61-3 to hold the referendum after the building was taken over by unmarked troops.
But I’ve got to point out that Maidan company commander Volodymyr Parasuk bragged after the 328-0 vote in the Rada to remove Yanukovych and install the Maidan government that “our people simply came up to the Verkhovna Rada and detained the deputies, so that they would sit and work and not run off anywhere”.
This followed Parasuk’s threats from the main stage of Maidan of an armed assault on the presidential administration and the Rada that preceded Yanukovych fleeing Kyiv the night before the vote.
I’ll also quote Canadian-Ukrainian scholar Ivan Katchanovski (remember him from last time when a 2025 Ukrainian court confirmed his version of who shot who in the Maidan) who wrote about that 328-0 Rada vote (he also claims that videos of the session show about 262 deputies present for the vote):
“Many others voted under threat of violence by the far-right group of Maidan snipers, the Maidan Self-Defense, and a mob which surrounded the parliament. The commander of the far-right-linked Maidan company of snipers admitted that his group impelled, by force, deputies from the Yanukovych Party of Regions to vote for his removal.”
Do you think those numbers held following the violence in Maidan and the fall of Yanukovych, the President backed most strongly by Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine?
But, the main point to make about Crimea is that the Russian Black Sea Fleet was already there and had been since 1783.
No Russian leader, even drunk Yeltsin, would have voluntarily surrendered the country’s only warm-water port.
First Rosemont Seneca Partners partner Devon Archer got his board seat on the day Joe Biden visited Kyiv) and then three weeks later Rosemont Seneca Partner partner Hunter Biden got his. And boy did he, partner.
The Senate Republicans claimed that his significant contribution to Rosemont Seneca’s vast experience and expertise in natural gas and doing business in Ukraine brought Hunter $50,000/month, but since a lot of people are rationally skeptical of GOP committees, we’ll go with the total of $708,302 which hit Hunter’s bank account between June 2014 and October 2015 (good work if you can get it).
“In retrospect, look, I think that it was poor judgment on my part. Is that I think that it was poor judgment because I don’t believe now, when I look back on it -- I know that there was -- did nothing wrong at all,” Hunter Biden told ABC News in an exclusive interview. “However, was it poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is...a swamp in — in — in many ways? Yeah.”
“I gave a hook to some very unethical people to act in illegal ways to try to do some harm to my father. That’s where I made the mistake,” said Biden. “So I take full responsibility for that. Did I do anything improper? No, not in any way. Not in any way whatsoever.”
And then the brutal Robach went for the jugular:
“If your last name wasn’t Biden,” Robach asked, “do you think you would’ve been asked to be on the board of Burisma?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not, in retrospect,” he said. “But that’s -- you know -- I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.”
“Because my dad was vice president of the United States. There’s literally nothing, as a young man or as a full grown adult that -- my father in some way hasn’t had influence over. It does not serve either one of us,” Biden continued.
Definitely not!
The disgusting part of all this otherwise totally cool, yet totally hot, natural gas action was that two totally uncool party poopers (NERDS!) crawled out of the administration and tried to object.
Deputy Secretary of State George Kent made a big hoo rah of his virtue when the (totally unfair and partisan) Senate GOP compelled him to testify:
George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state, testified Tuesday that he worried that Hunter Biden’s position at the firm Burisma Holdings would complicate efforts by U.S. diplomats to convey to Ukrainian officials the importance of avoiding conflicts of interest, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality rules surrounding the deposition.
Kent said he had concerns that Ukrainian officials would view Hunter Biden as a conduit for currying influence with his father, said the people. But when Kent raised the issue with Biden’s office, he was told the then-vice president didn’t have the “bandwidth” to deal with the issue involving his son as his other son, Beau, was battling cancer, said the people familiar with his testimony.
Apparently this Kent dude just didn’t get it: Beau had cancer! This was a difficult time!
Also State Department energy envoy Amos Hochstein also talked to the Senate committee and claimed that raised the topic of Hunter’s Burisma board seat with Biden in October 2015, and Hunter asked to see him in November.
Cannily Hochstein called out the real issue with the Vice POTUS’s son taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a shady Ukrainian company:
“we, the government, had seen increased traffic in Russian language in pro-Moscow outlets that were trying to create some kind of rift between the U.S. and Ukraine or to undermine the U.S. efforts, and that they were using Hunter Biden’s name in those articles to sow that doubt.”
Fortunately, Hunter getting his beak wet didn’t interfere with Hochstein doing his job:
“Hunter Biden’s presence on the board did not affect my day-to-day work or anybody else’s that I came in contact with… it was just something that I learned, and it was a data point.”
And what happened when Hunter invited him out to coffee in Georgetown?
“I shared with him that the Russians were using his name in order to sow disinformation. … It had been a tough several months on him, and I told him how worried I was about him and his father and his family. … (Hunter) had specifically mentioned that he had joined the board and was working on issues that were present and future, and that these were areas that had occurred in the past that he had no knowledge of.
In my conversation with Hunter Biden, I did not recommend that he leave the board… I don’t believe that was my place to have that discussion, one way or the other.
This is the kind of dildo-riffic hairsplitting nonsense we can count on Democratic administrations to deliver. Good thing someone was alert to the possibilities for Russian disinformation presented by Hunter being on the take.
And we haven’t even gotten to “the Old Man” yet.
Killing Those Pesky Investigations & Lecturing Ukraine About Corruption
We’ve drifted pretty far from dear old Mykold Zlochevsky, the founder of Burisma, so let’s get back to him and some issues that certainly had nothing to do with his perceived need to throw some chum Hunter’s way enlist the insightful and expert consulting services of Rosemont Seneca Partners, via Interfax Ukraine:
In April 2014, the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) froze (the accounts of Brociti Investments Ltd of former ecology minister of Ukraine Mykola Zlochevsky in the amount of $23 million). The investigation lasted for nine months. In early December of 2013, court hearings were held, and on January 20, 2015, the official decision on the illegality of the arrest of the company’s funds was issued.
Fortunately it was all cleared up and the money was released in January 2015 and “the old man” didn’t even have to do anything.
flame of hope was reignited by thousands of brave Ukrainians, some of you in this room, storming the Maidan, demanding a Revolution of Dignity. The world was transfixed. This time they were not going to be denied the future that so many of your country have longed for, for so long.
And the world was horrified when peaceful patriots were met by violence. They stayed at the Maidan day and night, facing down the Berkut in riot gear. For the first time since the Middle Ages, the bells of St. Mary [*sic] raised the alarm, calling the citizens of Ukraine to reinforce their brothers and sisters on the Maidan. Tens of thousands heeded the call bringing with them food, clothing, blankets, medical supplies, and their support. As the world watched -- and I was literally on the phone with your former President urging restraint -- as the world watched, the final assault came. Amidst fire and ice, snipers on rooftops, the Heavenly Hundred paid the ultimate price of patriots the world over. Their blood and courage delivering to the Ukrainian people a second chance for freedom. Their sacrifice -- to put it bluntly -- is now your obligation.
Then he sprinkled in a lot of anti-Putin talk, condemned “separatist thugs” in the Donbas, quoted his dad, Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke before getting down to the lecture:
…you also have a battle, a historic battle against corruption. Ukraine cannot afford for the people to lose hope again. The only thing worse than having no hope at all is having hopes rise and see them dashed repeatedly on the shoals of corruption.
And if the people resign themselves to exploitation and corruption for fear of losing whatever little they have left, that would be the death knell for Ukrainian democracy. We’ve taken so many critical steps already. But all of you know there’s more to do to finish this race. Not enough has been done yet.
As the Prime Minister and the President heard me often say, 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. The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform. The judiciary should be overhauled. The energy sector needs to be competitive, ruled by market principles -- not sweetheart deals. It’s not enough to push through laws to increase transparency with regard to official sources of income. Senior elected officials have to remove all conflicts between their business interest and their government responsibilities. Every other democracy in the world -- that system pertains.
Oligarchs and non-oligarchs must play by the same rules. They have to pay their taxes, settle their disputes in court -- not by bullying judges. That’s basic. That’s how nations succeed in the 21st century.
Corruption siphons away resources from the people. It blunts the economic growth, and it affronts the human dignity. We know that. You know that. The Ukrainian people know that. When Russia seeks to use corruption as a tool of coercion, reform isn’t just good governance, it’s self-preservation. It’s in the national security interest of the nation.
I’m desperately concerned about the backsliding on the part of Kiev in terms of corruption. They made—I mean, I’ll give you one concrete example. I was—not I, but it just happened to be that was the assignment I got. I got all the good ones. And so I got Ukraine. And I remember going over, convincing our team, our leaders to—convincing that we should be providing for loan guarantees. And 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. And they didn’t.
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.
(Laughter.)
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. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
Well, there’s still—so they made some genuine substantial changes institutionally and with people. But one of the three institutions, there’s now some backsliding.
The savvy crowd at the CFR got the joke fortunately and laughs were had aplenty. Definitely nothing corrupt about a sitting US Vice-POTUS threatening to withhold a billion dollars of appropriated money to remove another country’s chief prosecutor.
Even worse than the actual snitches were the digital snitches, though.
One email sent to Biden on May 13, 2017, with the subject line “Expectations,” included details of “remuneration packages” for six people involved in an unspecified business venture.
Biden was identified as “Chair / Vice Chair depending on agreement with CEFC,” an apparent reference to the former Shanghai-based conglomerate CEFC China Energy Co.
His pay was pegged at “850” and the email also noted that “Hunter has some office expectations he will elaborate.”
In addition, the email outlined a “provisional agreement” under which 80 percent of the “equity,” or shares in the new company, would be split equally among four people whose initials correspond to the sender and three recipients, with “H” apparently referring to Biden.
The deal also listed “10 Jim” and “10 held by H for the big guy?”
Neither Jim nor the “big guy” was identified further.
Resulting in this classic from Politico “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say” which featured the 51 former intelligence officials Morrell has rounded up signing a letter saying the laptop story has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Brilliant, my hat is off. And it worked for a long time, until it fell apart in the end, as all lies must.
New York Times, 14 Oct 2020:Glueck, Schmidt and Isaac: a report the social media companies “deemed so dubious that they limited access,” “based on material provided by Republican allies of President Trump”. Later:NYT, 16 Mar 2022: emails from the laptop cache “authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation”.
CBS, 60 Minutes, taped 20 Oct, aired 25 Oct 2020:Lesley Stahl to Trump: the laptop story “can’t be verified” (exchange cut from the broadcast). Later:CBS, 21 Nov 2022: forensic analysis of the laptop data “showed no tampering”.
NPR, 22 Oct 2020: Managing editor Terence Samuel: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories” (as quoted by the Daily Caller). Later:NPR CEO Katherine Maher to Congress, Mar 2025: “mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner”.
New York Times, 13 Sep 2021:Shane Goldmacher: “an unsubstantiated New York Post article”; the word was removed the same day without a correction notice. Later:NYT, 16 Mar 2022: emails from the laptop cache “authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation”.
The real punchline came when Facebook and Twitter piled on. I don’t know why shitlibs find censorship so comforting- oh wait, because they’re full of shit, right. Nevermind.
Facebook, 14 Oct 2020: spokesman Andy Stone says the story is “eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
Twitter, 14 Oct 2020: blocks links to the story in tweets and direct messages, citing its hacked-materials policy (NPR).
Twitter, 14–30 Oct 2020: locks the New York Post’s own account for two weeks, and unlocks it on 30 Oct after changing its policy.
Mark Zuckerberg to Jim Jordan, 26 Aug 2024: “the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma”; Facebook “temporarily demoted” the Post story; “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
The real fun came in 2022 when The NY Post (who I normally loathe) got to run about a dozen victory laps as so many “credible outlets” had to eat crow:
And as much as I’d love to post dozens of sexy pics of Hunter snorting coke off of hooker’s asses or whatever, I’ve got to wrap this up so we’ll end with the most damning thing on the laptop.
‘Unlike Pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary’
Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post.
The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads.
An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.
Hunter Biden’s access to lucrative financial opportunities also came with expectations — including kicking back as much as 50% of his earnings to his dad, text messages on his old laptop show.
“I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years,” Hunter Biden groused to daughter Naomi in January 2019. “It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.” Pop is Joe Biden.
The laptop — infamously abandoned at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019 — does not contain any direct evidence of such money transfers, but does show that Hunter was routinely on the hook for his father’s household expenses while Joe Biden was vice president.
Alright, next time I’ll wrap this monster up and cover the critical 2020-2024 era when the Ukraine Civil War turned into outright genocide, killing hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions.
Thanks Nat for doing these retrospective pieces. I find it so discouraging that people fixate on the horribleness of the current administration as if switching parties is going to provide a solution. Maybe what's happening is by heaping all our scorn on the White House today, in some way we think that absolves us from our own culpability in the run-up to this current situation.
Thanks Nat for doing these retrospective pieces. I find it so discouraging that people fixate on the horribleness of the current administration as if switching parties is going to provide a solution. Maybe what's happening is by heaping all our scorn on the White House today, in some way we think that absolves us from our own culpability in the run-up to this current situation.