Besides Kwasniewski, the board included other respected heavyweights. Alan Apter, an American investment banker based in London, had advised companies throughout Eastern Europe. Joseph Cofer Black, who would join the board in 2016, was director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center during the George W. Bush administration.
There’s no question my last name was a coveted credential. That has always been the case—do you think if any of the Trump children ever tried to get a job outside of their father’s business that his name wouldn’t figure into the calculation? My response has always been to work harder so that my accomplishments stand on their own.
Still, I was absolutely qualified to do what Burisma needed done. As is true with many boards, I wasn’t brought in to give expert advice in areas where the company already had experts—in this case, natural gas. My charge instead was to do what Boies Schiller recommended: make sure Burisma further implemented corporate practices that were up to accepted ethical snuff. Burisma wasn’t starting from zero; it didn’t appear to be some idle oligarch’s plaything. It’s an incredibly well-run company.
Am I an expert in corporate governance? Did I have experience and contacts around the world?
While an unpaid chair of the World Food Program USA, which the U.S. supported through six different agencies, I helped increase funding 60 percent in five years—to more than $2 billion. For my work there and at other nonprofits, including Catholic Charities and Bono’s One Campaign, I interacted with government and business officials in too many countries to count: Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Kenya, Djibouti—the list goes on. While at Amtrak, I helped spearhead the search for a new president, with the promise of negotiating a union contract for the first time in eight years. As a director in the Department of Commerce during the late 1990s, focusing on e-commerce, I traveled often with then-secretary William M. Daley, everywhere from Uruguay to Cairo to Vietnam to Ghana. I traveled so much for my own consulting business and had contacts in places so wide-ranging that my elevator pitch to clients was that we could help build their portfolio “from Baltimore to Beijing.”
So, yes, I brought something besides my name to the Burisma board’s table.
My association was transparent and widely reported on from the start. Burisma put out a press release about my appointment, and within a week the Wall Street Journal ran a news story. That’s when Dad called and said, “I hope you know what you’re doing,” wanting to make sure I’d done the due diligence and legwork necessary to make certain I was on the right side of things.
I assured him I had. I’d been involved in overseas enterprises throughout his two terms as vice president—since I had to stop lobbying for the interests of Jesuit universities and others—and no one at Burisma had even hinted at wanting me to influence the administration. The fact is, there was almost nowhere in the world that didn’t somehow cross my father’s spheres of influence.
The executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit government watchdog group, told a reporter at the time, “It can’t be that because your dad is the vice president you can’t do anything.”
The irony, of course, is that my name’s weight in Ukraine came from my dad’s position as point man for the administration’s push to get the country to clean up its act. Both U.S. and international support for Ukraine, and for the pro-Western president who replaced Yanukovych, was pegged to rooting out corruption. In many instances, that corruption was tied directly to Putin’s growing influence.
A priority for my dad was the ouster of the country’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, for his failure to adequately investigate corruption. It was a view shared widely by European allies. Among the high-profile companies that Shokin was criticized for not pursuing: Burisma.
What came into focus for me after looking into Burisma was just how high a priority the takeover of Ukraine’s energy sector had become for Russia. As Kwasniewski had detailed to me during his initial pitch, Russia appeared to be attacking Burisma as much as it was assailing Ukraine.
That assessment has since been validated by any number of revelations.
It came to light that Russian military spies attempted to hack Burisma in the fall of 2019, in search of dirt on me and my father. Their raid on Burisma’s servers and emails coincided with last November’s congressional impeachment inquiry into Trump, which centered on whether he strong-armed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing a probe of Burisma and me. Trump backed that threat by withholding nearly $400 million in approved military aid and putting Ukrainian lives at risk. The Russian culprits belonged to the same spy agency that hacked the Democratic Party servers and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, in 2016.
Meanwhile, Giuliani’s rogue dirt-finding mission on behalf of the president unraveled almost daily. Texts and documents supplied by Giuliani’s Ukrainian American point man, Lev Parnas, revealed just how low and compromised those overseas dealings have been—and underscore why Trump adopted my name as a rallying cry to divert attention from his own. These include notes Parnas took while speaking to Giuliani by phone in a hotel in Vienna. One was an almost comically clear reference to their effort to get “Zalensky” (as Parnas spelled his name in the note) to announce investigations into my dad. In fact, it said almost exactly that: “Get Zalensky to Announce that the Biden case will Be Investigated.”
Among Parnas’s many blockbuster revelations, one of the most damning was Giuliani’s connection to Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch whom U.S. federal prosecutors have described in court papers as an associate of Russian organized crime (which he denied). More charitable descriptions of Firtash include a “Kremlin influence agent” and, from a Ukrainian parliamentarian who investigated him, “a political person representing Russian interests in Ukraine.” It has also been reported that Firtash is attached to Semion Mogilevich, believed to be the Russian Mafia’s “boss of
