"In a statement, Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said,
“we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
“Investigations by the press, during impeachment,
and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath,” Bates said.
Bates added that the Biden campaign could not immediately respond to the story’s allegations in the Post story when it ran on Wednesday morning, because the publication “never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story. They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani — whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported — claimed to have such materials.”
The Post did not address the Biden camp’s complaints, instead pointing to an editorial that accused social media companies of censoring the story to help Biden politically.
The Post story included a screenshot of what the paper said was a 2015 email from Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden, thanking him for “the opportunity to meet your father.” But the email doesn’t indicate whether Pozharskyi was describing a meeting that had already occurred or one intended to occur in the future. Nevertheless, the Post reported that the existence of such a meeting undercut Biden’s long-held assertions that he had no involvement with his son’s business dealings.
Biden’s campaign would not rule out the possibility that the former VP had some kind of informal interaction with Pozharskyi, which wouldn’t appear on Biden’s official schedule. But they said any encounter would have been cursory. Pozharskyi did not respond to a request for comment.
And senior Biden advisers who spoke to POLITICO on Wednesday — including Michael Carpenter and Amos Hochstein, who staffed the vice president at the time — similarly said that while there was never an official meeting, it’s technically conceivable that Pozharskyi would have approached Biden on the sidelines of some broader U.S.-Ukraine event. But they emphasized that
they have no indication that happened, and that they had never heard of Pozharskyi before.
“I’ve literally never heard of this guy in my life,” said Hochstein, a close Biden adviser who served as a special envoy for International Energy Affairs at the State Department during the Obama administration.
“This is a Russian disinformation operation,” said Carpenter, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who specialized in Russia, Eurasia and the Balkans and now serves as managing director of the Penn Biden Center. “
I’m very comfortable saying that.”
The campaign cast the allegations against Joe and Hunter Biden as “Russian disinformation,” while Republicans complained that social media companies were censoring the story.
www.politico.com