False: Hunter introduced Joe Biden to a top executive at the Ukrainian energy firm from where he received $50K/month.

By: Devika Kandelwal
October 16 2020

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The emails shared by NYP have not yet been independently verified and no evidence has been found which suggests wrongdoing on Joe Biden's part.On Oct. 14, New York Post released an exclusive where it stated that according to some emails accessed by them, “Hunter Biden introduced his father, former 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.” The emails allegedly show that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, sent Hunter Biden on Apr. 17, 2015, stating, “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together. It’s really an honor and pleasure.” The Post reported on another email, which was sent in 2014 and allegedly showed Pozharskyi asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf. The Post reported that they obtained these emails from data recovered from a laptop, which was dropped off at a repair shop in Delaware in Apr. 2019. The shopkeeper told the Post that the person who brought in the laptop for repair never retrieved the laptop or a hard drive on which its contents were stored. The Post also noted that the shop owner couldn’t accurately identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said the laptop had a sticker of the Beau Biden Foundation. The FBI seized the hard drive in Dec. 2019, but before the store owner gave it, he made a copy of the hard-drive which he eventually gave to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello. Hunter Biden's business dealings have been a topic of discussion ever since Joe Biden decided to run for office. In 2014, Hunter Biden became a board member of Burisma, which many news reports and analysts said was a conflict of interest, given his father’s position as Vice President of the United States. But, Joe Biden, on numerous occasions, has said that he did not discuss Burisma with his son. However, The New York Post published PDF printouts of these emails allegedly taken from the laptop, but the primary email which is talking about the alleged meeting, shows only a photo made the day before the story was posted, according to Thomas Rid, the author of “Active Measures,” a book on disinformation. He further states, “There is no header information, no metadata.” He also said that the photos which were shared by The Post could have been provided to authenticate the alleged emails, and there is no proof that they were retrieved from the hard drive. The Wall Street Journal's Kevin Poulsen noted on Twitter that the pictures of the emails posted by The Post were PDFs - the PDF of the May 2014 email was created on October 10, 2019, and the PDF of the April 2015 email was produced on September 28, 2019. Furthermore, the claims made in the Post article and the emails have not been independently verified or authenticated by other news organizations. Washington Post noted that there seems to be no indication or proof that Hunter Biden replied to the emails as his responses were not posted by The Post. WaPo also quoted Nicheal Carpenter, Joe Biden’s foreign policy adviser in 2015, saying, “I was with the vice president in all of his meetings on Ukraine, and He never met with this guy. In fact, I had never heard of this guy until the New York Post story broke.” WaPo reached out to Hunter Biden to verify the email. Biden’s attorney George Mesires told WaPo: “We have no idea where this came from, and certainly cannot credit anything that Rudy Giuliani provided to the NY Post, but what I do know for certain is that this purported meeting never happened.” At the time of writing, as the access to the laptop’s hard drive has not been granted to any organization, and none of them have been able to verify or authenticate these emails independently, we conclude that this claim is false. Moreover, no evidence has been found that suggests any criminal wrongdoing on Joe Biden’s part.