Joe Biden’s team blocked CIA from distributing report on son Hunter’s Ukraine business dealings

Then-Vice President Joe Biden’s team intervened in February 2016 to prevent the CIA from disseminating an intelligence report to policymakers about the perceptions senior Ukrainian officials held about his son’s business dealings, newly declassified memos show. 

The request that the intelligence community withhold the report from others in the U.S. government by Biden’s national security advisor was “extremely rare and unusual,” a senior CIA official told Just the News. 

“I just spoke with VP/NSA and he would strongly prefer the report not/not be disseminated,” the vice president’s Presidential Daily Brief briefer told the CIA. “Thanks for understanding.” 

The report, reviewed by Just the News, compiled the reactions of senior Ukrainian government officials to the December 2015 visit of Vice President Biden to Kyiv. 

In the aftermath of the country’s Maidan Revolution and the Russian seizure of Crimea, Biden had been appointed President Barack Obama’s point man to manage U.S. policy towards the fledgling, pro-Western government.  

The document shows that the Ukrainian officials in the government of then-President Petro Poroshenko, were disappointed with the vice president’s visit to their country for his lack of substantive discussions with their leader. Those same officials “privately mused” about the U.S. media’s scrutiny on Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine, the report shows. 

“These officials viewed the alleged ties of the U.S. Vice President’s family to corruption in Ukraine as evidence of a double-standard within the United States Government towards matters of corruption and political power,” the CIA relayed.

The intelligence report also shows that the Ukrainian officials “expressed bewilderment and disappointment” about the vice president’s visit because he did not engage in any of the expected discussions about substantive matters with Poroshenko or other senior officials.

You can read the declassified document below: 

The vice president’s December 2015 visit to Kyiv has been the subject of much scrutiny surrounding Hunter Biden’s business dealings with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. It was on that trip that Vice President Biden decided to alter U.S. policy to call for Poroshenko to fire his chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. The vice president threatened to withhold a substantial U.S. loan guarantee if not. 

At the time, Shokin was probing Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, for corruption. His son, Hunter, had just officially joined the board of the company in May 2014. Shortly before the vice president’s trip, then-Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt warned Biden’s top advisors that the U.S. government considered Burisma corrupt. 

Pyatt later told his successor, Marie Yovanovitch, that he believed that Hunter Biden’s presence on the Burisma board “undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we were advancing in Ukraine,” echoing what Ukrainian officials were thinking, according to the CIA.  

Yet, Biden’s demands broke with State Department and European Union assessments that Shokin’s progress on anti-corruption reforms at the prosecutor’s office was sufficient to warrant new guarantees to the struggling Ukraine, Just the News previously reported in 2023. 

Following that reporting, fact-checkers revised their narrative and confirmed that the elder Biden “called an audible” aboard Air Force Two on his way to Ukraine, breaking with those official assessments and deciding to call for Shokin’s ouster. 

The memos were brought to the attention of current CIA leadership following a review of the intelligence agency’s databases that began in late 2024, under the prior administration. 

CIA officials determined that, at the time the report was drafted, it met the threshold for dissemination to U.S. officials before the vice president’s office intervened, a senior CIA official told Just the News. 

The official said that such information would have been useful to those U.S. officials dealing with U.S.-Ukraine policy, as it represented the thinking of several senior Ukrainian figures.

It was also “extremely rare and unusual” for an official outside the Intelligence Community to weigh in on whether the report should be disseminated, the senior official told Just the News. He said that typically a determination is made from within the community, without input from other officials. 

Additionally, the document provides no indication about how the vice president’s office was made aware of the intelligence report before it intervened with the CIA.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who was confirmed by the Senate in January, has made it part of his mission to root out what the Trump administration describes as weaponization and politicization infecting the agency. 

"Mr. President, the CIA is being restructured at your direction to focus on our core mission and to eliminate the political – the well-documented politicization that has taken place in the intelligence community from bad actors in the past to focus on our core mission and to Make America Safe Again,” Ratcliffe said at a Cabinet meeting in April. 

The senior CIA official told Just the News that Ratcliffe views Biden’s intervention as part of this politicization and decided to release the document as part of his commitment to transparency.