House Republicans Press White House to Turn over Drafts of Then-VP Biden’s 2015 Speech in Ukraine

House Republicans sent a letter to the White House on Wednesday demanding the administration turn over all drafts of a speech then-Vice President Biden delivered before the Ukrainian Rada in 2015.

In the December 2015 speech, Biden warned Ukraine it should do more to fight corruption or it would lose international support. He called for reforms to increase transparency and warned “corruption eats Ukraine like cancer.”

In spring 2014, Hunter Biden joined the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma at a salary of $1 million per year. President Biden visited Ukraine soon after his son received his first payment. During his trip, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in promised aid if Ukrainian officials did not fire top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma’s founder and CEO, Mykola Zlochevsky, at the time.

Shokin was fired in March 2016, and Biden later bragged about his role in the prosecutor’s ouster in 2018.

Hunter Biden previously sought to take credit for his father’s earlier trip to Ukraine in April 2014. Days before the younger Biden and his business partner Devon Archer joined Burisma’s board in 2014, Hunter told Archer in emails that they should tell Burisma leaders that the trip was evidence of their influence and value.

“The announcement of my guy’s upcoming travels should be characterized as part of our advice and thinking — but what he will say and do is out of our hands,” the younger Biden wrote to Archer, referring to his father. “In other words, it could be a really good thing or it could end up creating too great an expectation. We need to temper expectations regarding that visit.”

The House Committees on Oversight, Judiciary and Ways and Means first requested the drafts from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on August 17.

“For more than five months the White House has declined to authorize the production of these draft speeches to the Oversight Committee or to assert a valid privilege over them,” wrote Oversight Chairman James Comer, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith in a letter obtained by National Review. “Such a lengthy delay in processing a discrete and limited category of documents is unacceptable and appears to represent an attempt to obstruct the Committees’ legitimate investigation.”

In the letter to White House counsel Edward Siskel, the committees set a deadline of February 7 for the White House to turn over the requested documents or to assert a legitimate privilege over the information, or the lawmakers “will consider the use of compulsory process to require the White House’s production of the speeches.”

NARA told the committees it would have been able to provide the requested documents within a week of the committees’ first request. But the White House has extended its review period over the documents for 60 days, three separate times, most recently on January 22.

The White House told NARA on the day of its first extension request that “Release of this material would be fairly extraordinary, as it may make public foreign affairs deliberations of the person who is now the sitting President and his advisers, and as such requires additional review and analysis.”

“This extension will also give us time to explore appropriate accommodations with Chairman Comer so as to avoid the concerns mentioned above,” the White House added at the time, though the committee says it has no record of any such outreach.

The lawmakers say the situation casts “considerable doubt as to whether the White House has requested these extensions in good faith or is simply attempting to delay the production of this very limited tranche of documents to the Committee.”

Meanwhile, the White House previously allowed NARA to turn over presidential records related to the Trump administration after just one month of review. “We expect the White House to do the same in this instance,” the lawmakers write.

The request comes amid increased scrutiny of President Biden’s relationship with Ukraine during his time as vice president.

Archer previously told the Oversight Committee that Hunter Biden’s value on Burisma’s board was “the brand.” Archer said then-vice president Biden was “the brand.”

“Burisma would have gone out of business if ‘the brand’ had not been attached to it,” Archer said, according to the committee.

And in the spring of 2014 and 2015, then-VP Biden attended dinners with Hunter Biden; Archer; Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina; Burisma executives; and Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakhstani oligarch.