A jailed former business associate of Hunter Biden has recently claimed that the son of Joe Biden tried to get $5 million from a Ukrainian oligarch in order to stop a U.S. indictment during his father’s vice presidential tenure.
According to Just The News, Jason Galanis made these claims in testimony before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees as part of the ongoing impeachment inquiry against the elder Biden. A similar claim had been made back in 2021 by Hares Youssef, who had worked closely with the oligarch in question, Dmitri Firtash.
The incident took place in 2015, when Firtash was a fugitive facing an indictment in the United States. Hunter’s efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, and Firtash is still facing charges which may lead to his extradition to the U.S. from his current home in Austria. In the end, Hunter’s efforts instead led to a $3 million investment in a tech fund that Hunter, Galanis, and other partners had founded called mBloom.
Galanis further claimed that $300,000 of the investment money went to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, a firm run by Hunter Biden that was used for payments he received from another Ukrainian oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky, the head of the controversial Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.
Firtash was indicted by the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) in April of 2014 on charges of corruption. Various lawyers for Firtash over the years have argued against the charges, filed in a federal court in Chicago, and have consistently delayed extradition attempts.
In his most recent testimony before Congress, Hunter mentioned Firtash despite not being asked any direct questions about their relationship or the attempt to bail him out. Hunter remarked that “there were two gas companies inside of Ukraine at that time. One of them was the state-owned, which was highly corrupt and connected to people like Firtash, which was directly going into Vladimir Putin’s pocket.”
“The only independent company was Burisma,” Hunter continued. “And Burisma was supplying 60 percent of all natural gas to power the entire industry in Ukraine, including 78 percent of all steel mills. And so they needed to survive.”
The Firtash story adds yet another layer to Hunter’s history with Ukraine in particular, the heart of the allegations of corruption and influence-peddling by the First Son. While he has also credibly been accused of shady foreign business deals in other countries such as Russia and China, his Ukrainian activities have received the most scrutiny since the beginning.
While Hunter served on the board of Burisma, the company came under investigation for corruption by Ukraine’s then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Evidence increasingly suggests that due to Hunter’s involvement with the company, then-Vice President Joe Biden pressured Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenkot to fire Shokin and end the Burisma investigation, threatening to withhold $1 billion of American aid unless he did so. Shokin was ultimately fired and the investigation dropped, with Biden later publicly bragging about the incident in what he considered a display of strength rather than corruption.