Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign is denying a report in The New York Post alleging the former vice president met with an executive for Burisma while he was still in office.
On Wednesday, the Post published a report that said emails showed that Hunter Biden introduced his father, while he was still vice president to an executive for Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Hunter Biden was added to Burisma’s board in 2014.
The Post says the emails, reportedly from 2015, were recovered from a laptop in a repair shop in April 2019. The paper says the laptop was turned over to the FBI in December 2019.
The Post said that President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, gave the paper a copy of the laptop’s hard drive on Sunday.
In a statement to Politico hours after the report was published, Biden spokesman Andrew Bates said, “Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump Administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.”
“The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story. They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani – whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported – claimed to have such materials.
“Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” the statement added.
The Post alleges that the emails run contrary to Joe Biden’s 2019 statement that he has “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealing.”
One email reportedly from the laptop appears to show that Joe Biden did meet with Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma.
As of Wednesday afternoon, third-party fact checkers have yet to verify the details of the story.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a tweet, “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners.”
This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending fact-checker review. https://t.co/vf3CBvLmjj
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 14, 2020
“In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform,” he added.
Stone explained that the decision is “part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation.”
Senate Republicans have been probing Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine for several months. In September, the Senate Homeland Security and Finance Committees released an interim report on their investigations into his dealings.
The report found that “Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board negatively impacted the efforts of dedicated career-service individuals who were fighting to push for anticorruption measures in Ukraine.”
The investigations of Hunter Biden have been panned as a partisan attempt to help Trump ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives in 2019 for his efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials to investigate the Bidens and their dealings with Burisma. However, he was acquitted in the Senate in 2020.
