by WorldTribune Staff, October 16, 2025 Real World News
Joe Biden’s team pressured the CIA not to disseminate an intelligence report to U.S. lawmakers regarding the then-vice president’s 2015 trip to Ukraine, newly declassified documents show.
The documents, released by current CIA Director John Ratcliffe, show that Ukrainian officials, including then-President Petro Poroshenko, criticized Biden for not discussing anything of substance with them and only giving a generic speech to the country’s parliament.
It was during the same December 2015 visit that Biden called on Ukraine to fire top prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Biden threatened to withhold a substantial U.S. loan guarantee if Shokin was not fired.
At the time, Shokin was investigating Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, for corruption. Hunter Biden had officially joined the Burisma board 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.
Among the documents released earlier this month was an email message from an Obama Administration official in touch with Joe Biden’s office at the time he was vice president in which a top Biden aide stated: “I just spoke with VP/NSA and he would strongly prefer the report not/not be disseminated. Thanks for understanding.”
Related: Secret Service records show Hunter Biden took 411 flights, visited 29 countries, June 29, 2020
The request that the intelligence community withhold the report on Biden’s visit from others in the U.S. government was “extremely rare and unusual,” a senior CIA official told Just the News.
According to the CIA’s report on Biden’s December 2015 trip to Ukraine — which, like the email message about the report itself, is heavily redacted — Ukrainian officials were dismayed with Biden’s visit.
“As of mid-December 2015 … officials within the administration of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko expressed bewilderment and disappointment at the 7–8 December 2015 visit of the Vice President of the United States to Kiev, Ukraine,” the intelligence report says.
“After the visit, these officials assessed that the Vice President of the United States had come to Kiev almost exclusively to give a generic public speech, and had no intention of discussing substantive matters with Poroshenko or other officials within the Ukrainian government.”
The report states that once Biden departed Ukraine, government officials “privately mused” that the then-vice president would not meet with Poroshenko because he did not want to suffer “U.S. media scrutiny of the alleged ties of the U.S. Vice President’s family to corrupt business practices in Ukraine.”
“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 report assesses.
At the time the report was written, Hunter Biden was being paid around $50,000 per month. He received the payouts until he departed the firm in 2019.
Documents: Team Biden pressed CIA to withhold records on his visit to Ukraine added by Editor Two on
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