A new report from recent Fox News hire John Solomon tosses gasoline on the dumpster-fire narrative at the heart of an impeachment inquiry launched after a CIA officer filed a whistleblower complaint, alleging President Trump abused his office by “pressuring” the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter for corruption.
According to Solomon, a new document “shows that Ukrainian officials had opened a new probe into the firm linked to Hunter Biden months before President Trump’s phone call with that country’s leader.”
Solomon said Tuesday on ‘Hannity‘ that the US government knew Ukraine was planning to look again into activities at Burisma Holdings, an energy company that employed then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son as a member of its board of directors, early this year. The report is noteworthy because President Trump has been accused by Democrats of threatening in July to withhold foreign aid to Ukraine unless its new president pursued an investigation into the company and the younger Biden’s role there.
‘The US government had open-source intelligence and was aware as early as February of 2019 that the Ukrainian government was planning to reopen the Burisma investigation,’ he claimed. ‘This is long before the president ever imagined having a call with President Zelensky,’ he added, noting Petro Poroshenko was still Ukraine’s president at that time. –Fox News
According to Solomon, Ukraine’s NABU anti-corruption agency requested reopening a probe into Burisma and its owner Mykola Zlochevsky.
According to the report, “The investigation then went forward, Solomon said. The new probe later resulted in a “Notice of Suspicion” being filed, alleging the existence of “illicit funds” running through the firm, Solomon also claimed.”
Solomon said his reporting revealed the requested reopening of the probe into Burisma involved, in part, ‘unusual transactions’ in the natural gas giant’s accounts.
Solomon said the timeline of the alleged ‘illicit funds’ coincided in part with the time Hunter Biden held a place on the firm’s board. The younger Biden was reportedly paid as much as $1 million per year for his time on the board, but Solomon said investigators in Ukraine filed a 15-page ‘notice of suspicion’ indicating they were ‘looking at the possibility that the $3.4 million paid to Hunter Biden’s firm may have been part of the illicit funds that were moving through the company.’
‘A month later, in April, the prosecutor’s office — open-source intelligence, again — the US government officials confirming they were aware of this — made a request of another investigative agency in Ukraine for assistance in going through these bank records,’ Solomon claimed. –Fox News
“That is a significant change in the timeline,” said Solomon, adding “it was omitted from the whistleblower’s complaint, and the question is did he not know it or did he exclude it because it didn’t fit the narrative he was trying to write.”
Reprinted with permission from ZeroHedge.
