POLITICS: Exclusive Miranda Devine book excerpt

Hunter Biden’s abandoned MacBook was a window into the Biden family business, a secret international influence peddling operation. New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, who exposed many of Hunter’s secrets in her book “Laptop from Hell,” returns with “The Big Guy,” the story of how the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, the IRS and the Department of Justice conspired to protect Joe Biden and his family. Here, in a second exclusive excerpt, she explains the Ukrainian intrigue that surrounded Joe and Hunter:

Hunter Biden was invited to join the Burisma board at the Italian resort of Lake Como, where he had flown with his best friend and business partner Devon Archer in April 2014 to a management conference at the Villa d’Este, a sumptuous haunt of Russian oligarchs overlooking the water.

It was six weeks after the collapse of Viktor Yanukovych’s government in Ukraine, and Hunter and Archer joked in emails before they arrived that they were living like the fictional spies, James Bond and Jason Bourne: “Might be very Bond/Bourne to get the ’gharchs [oligarchs] up at the lake for a meeting,” Archer wrote.

They had a meeting scheduled with Russia’s richest woman, Elena Baturina, who had just wired $3.5 million to their firm, Rosemont Seneca Thornton. 

‘Use your influence’

The next day, Hunter met Burisma official Vadym Pozharskyi for the first time. 

According to Archer, Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky, 48, asked Hunter to join the Burisma board during a walk by the lake.

“I am strongly leaning towards agreeing to board position. Let’s decide this and move on it by Monday,” Hunter emailed Archer a few days later.

Hunter wanted the board seat — and the $83,333 a month payment that came with it — but he needed Burisma to hide his involvement to avoid bad optics for his father. 

Pozharskyi pushed back firmly in an email: “I do believe that we have to reach reasonable balance here,” he told Archer. “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 . . . [but] we cannot ‘hide’ our directors.”

As soon as Hunter joined the board, Pozharskyi wasted no time pressuring him to “use your influence” to combat the Ukrainian government’s allegations against Burisma of “misappropriation, embezzlement or conversion of property by malversation.”

“Following our talks during the visit to the Como Lake and our further discussions, I would like to bring the following situation to your attention,” wrote Pozharskyi the following month. “One or more pretrial proceedings were initiated by the [Ukrainian] Ministry of Internal Affairs with regard to Burisma Holdings companies . . . We urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message/signal, etc to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions.”

Two weeks after the Lake Como trip, Hunter and Archer visited the vice president’s office in the White House, ostensibly for help with a book project for Archer’s son Luke. 

While they were there, Hunter took a photograph of Archer with his father in front of an American flag that would be posted on Burisma’s website the following day, April 17, 2014, as evidence of the corrupt company’s powerful friends in the US.

The same day, almost 4,000 miles away in London’s Central Criminal Court, Britain’s redoubtable Serious Fraud Office  was granted a court order to freeze $23 million in Zlochevsky’s London bank accounts.

At a high-powered international forum in London later that week, the British government showcased the Zlochevsky investigation as a textbook case of the first successful seizure of assets stolen by Yanukovych’s regime. It was seen as a feather in the cap of lawmakers from all over the world.

Alas, they all were left with egg on their faces.

Back in Ukraine, something had gone terribly wrong, and according to George Kent, the bow-tie-wearing deputy chief of mission with the US Embassy in Kyiv, it was because “a $7 million bribe was paid.” 

In December 2014, in the Old Bailey criminal court of London, Zlochevsky’s defense lawyers produced a letter signed by a junior investigator in Ukrainian Prosecutor General Vitaly Yarema’s office, stating that there was “no active case against their client.”

Judge [Nicholas] Blake dismissed the case and unfroze Zlochevsky’s funds.

‘A job I didn’t want’

The SFO team was furious with their American counterparts in Kyiv. The FBI was embedded in the embassy in Ukraine. They were supposed to be in constant contact with the Prosecutor General’s Office. They had assured the Brits the Zlochevsky case was under control. 

Instead, the Zlochevsky case simply faded away.

This was the mess that Viktor Shokin, then 62, walked into when he was nominated as Prosecutor General on Feb. 10, 2015, after then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko fired the disgraced Yarema.

In an interview via encrypted voice call with a translator on the line, Shokin, now 72, told me he was reluctant to take the job, the Ukrainian equivalent of the attorney general, because he knew it was a political poisoned chalice. 

“I had held the position of deputy prosecutor general three times,” he said. “I was very experienced in cases of corruption and related investigations . . . What I think happened was that Poroshenko tried to increase his own credibility by appointing me to be Prosecutor General . . . He literally talked me into becoming Prosecutor General. It was a job that I didn’t want.”

A twice-married widower and father of three, Shokin lives alone on a pension in a modest house he built himself 25 years ago in a village near a lake outside Kyiv. 

He prides himself on his integrity and was not regarded as corrupt by ordinary Ukrainians during his decades as a prosecutor, a miracle in a country where nothing is as it seems, oligarchs rule the roost and prosecuting your political opponents is par for the course. 

While the Bidens and their defenders continually branded him corrupt, they never produced any evidence.
He was popular with the public because of his reputation for taking on the powerful and his flair for the dramatic. He had solved several high-profile corruption cases and had been the target of at least one assassination attempt.

The Zlochevsky case had been opened in 2012 under one of Shokin’s predecessors, Viktor Pshonka, over allegations of money laundering, tax evasion and corruption. 

But Pshonka’s term was cut short when he fled to Russia in 2014 with the rest of Yanukovich’s cronies. 

‘Highly illegal’

One of the first things Shokin did when he became prosecutor general was to reopen the case: “We started exploring and investigating the Zlochevsky situation and looking into the illegal activities by Burisma, which were highly illegal,” he told me. 

“Zlochevsky had been a minister in Yanukovych [sic] cabinet and he himself handed out licenses to himself to produce gas in Ukraine . . . They were producing gas illegally.”

Shokin placed Zlochevsky, who was in exile in Monaco and Dubai, on Ukraine’s “most-wanted” list on suspicion of embezzlement.

By the fall of 2015, he was planning to interview Hunter and other members of the Burisma board. He describes Hunter as a “wedding general,” a Russian term for a well-connected figurehead who has no role to play in the business. The term comes from a 19th-century tradition of bourgeois families in Russia inviting a retired general to a wedding to provide gravitas.

“There was a good reason for Zlochevsky to invite Hunter Biden to Burisma. Clearly, it was because he was the son of the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden. He was in a position to help Zlochevsky because the vice president was handling Ukraine affairs for the United States, and basically, he was in charge of all things domestic and foreign for Ukraine.

“Archer was invited [onto the board], too, and soon photographs of all of them together, Archer, [and Hunter] Biden appeared in various media outlets in Ukraine in a show of their support for him [Zlochevsky]. We knew that Zlochevsky was using those photographs to prove that he had them as patrons and protectors.

“Zlochevsky, of course, understood that sooner or later, he will be punished for all the evil things and the crimes he committed against Ukraine. And that is why he was trying all these things [to get off the hook]. However, no matter how hard he tried, the investigation was going ahead at full speed and as scheduled.”

Burisma was under “pressure from Ukrainian Government investigations into [Zlochevsky], et cetera,” Archer testified to the impeachment committee in 2024, “and they [Zlochevsky and Pozharskyi] requested Hunter, you know, help them with some of that pressure.”

That pressure was being exerted by Shokin. The pressure is what prompted Pozharskyi to write Hunter and Archer increasingly urgent emails in the fall of 2015, demanding that they use their influence to “close down” the criminal investigation against Burisma. 

It is what precipitated the phone call to Joe that Zlochevsky and Pozharskyi got Hunter to make the night of the board meeting in Dubai in December 2015.

It is the pressure that the Bidens and their defenders repeatedly ignored, claiming instead that Shokin had let the criminal case against Burisma go dormant because he was corrupt.

On March 29, 2016, Poroshenko and the parliament of Ukraine, the Rada, succumbed to Joe’s threats that he would withhold $1 billion in US aid unless Shokin was fired. Shokin is certain Joe pushed him out to protect Hunter.

“The United States is a respectable country, and I like it very much,” Shokin told me. “But who gave Biden authority to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign country and act like its handler? A lot of damage was done, and a great deal of people knew about it and that’s why the Supreme Council [of the Rada] initially refused to sanction my resignation.”

Joe Biden’s defense of Hunter’s Ukrainian grift relies on Shokin being corrupt. The Democrats impeached Donald Trump on the strength of that uncorroborated allegation.

Shokin has maintained his innocence ever since and points out that, eight years after his ouster, nobody has produced any evidence of wrongdoing by him.

Just a coincidence?

In the damage control narrative created by the Bidens and their allies, and laundered through friendly media outlets, it was not just US policy but very much the Europeans — the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission — who wanted Shokin out. 

In this scenario, Joe had little agency and it was just a coincidence that the removal of Shokin benefited the company that was paying his wayward son $1 million a year.

However, none of the European bodies cited had ever called specifically for Shokin’s removal or even mentioned his name. The charges against Burisma and Zlochevsky were dropped just seven months after Shokin was fired.

Joe lauded Shokin’s successor, Yuri Lutsenko, as “solid” when he was appointed. US officials praised the former political prisoner as a reformer who would eradicate corruption in the Prosecutor General’s Office.

Yet a few months after taking office, Lutsenko closed all “legal proceedings and pending criminal allegations” against Zlochevsky and removed him from the “most wanted” list Shokin had placed him on. 

After paying a fine, the Burisma owner was free to return to Ukraine from exile.

Excepted with permission from “The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America” by Miranda Devine, out Tuesday from Broadside Books.