In Consortium News, Max Blumenthal illuminates one aspect of the Hunter Biden story that other news outlets are ignoring.
Burisma, the Ukraine gas company that employed the son of Joe Biden, the American vice president, also doles out money to other Washington power players in order to buy influence in Washington. So, while cable news prognosticators chatter about corruption in Ukraine, they overlook the business model of the Atlantic Council, located on 15th Street in downtown Washington.
Blumenthal notes
the Atlantic Council has initiated a lucrative relationship with a corruption-tainted Ukrainian gas company, the Burisma Group, that is worth as much as $250,000 a year. The partnership has paid for lavish conferences in Monaco and helped bring Burisma’s oligarchic founder out of the cold. This alliance has remained stable even as official Washington goes to war over allegations by President Donald Trump and his allies that former Vice President Joseph Biden fired a Ukrainian prosecutor to defend his son
Leave Hunter Biden out of the story, and you still have a story of corruption. Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch who assembled Burisma under dubious pretenses, was still seeking influential allies in Washington, even after he employed the son of the American vice president.
Zlochevsky found friends at the Atlantic Council in 2017, literally hours after he was cleared of corruption charges in Ukraine.
On Jan. 19, 2017 — just two days after the investigation of Zlochevsky ended — Burisma announced a major “cooperative agreement” with the Atlantic Council. “It became possible to sign a cooperative agreement between Burisma and the Atlantic Council after all charges against Burisma Group companies and its owner [Mykola] Zlochevskyi were withdrawn,” the Kyiv Post reported at the time.
The deal was inked by the director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia program, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine named John Herbst.
Since then, Burisma helped bankroll Atlantic Council programming, including an energy security conference held this May in Monaco, where Zlochevsky currently lives.
“[Zlochevsky] invited them purely for whitewashing purposes, to put them on the façade and make this company look nice,” Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, said of the Monaco event to The Financial Times.
What this shows is that the corruption that Washington pundits decry in Kiev is evident much closer to home.
