A dramatization of real events. Click here for Part I.
March 1, 2015 - Café Milano, Georgetown
The private dining room at Café Milano hummed with quiet conversation and the clink of expensive stemware. Hunter had reserved the best table, the one tucked away where Washington power brokers could meet without the prying eyes of tourists or junior staffers.
Vadym Pozharskyi, advisor to Burisma’s board, had flown in from Kiev specifically for this dinner. He sat across from Hunter, nervous energy barely concealed beneath his Eastern European formality.
“Will he come?” Pozharskyi asked, checking his watch for the third time.
“Relax,” Hunter said, sipping his wine. “He’ll be here.”
At 7:47 PM, Vice President Joe Biden walked into the private room, Secret Service detail discreetly positioned outside. Warm smiles, firm handshakes, the practiced choreography of Washington networking.
“Vadym, this is my father,” Hunter said, as if introducing a college friend to his dad at a football game, not connecting a Ukrainian energy executive to the second most powerful man in America.
They talked for eighteen minutes—sports, weather, nothing of substance, everything plausibly deniable.
But Pozharskyi would later send an email thanking Hunter for “the opportunity to meet your father and spend some time together.”
Opportunity. That word again. In Washington, opportunity was currency.
June 1, 2015 - A Major New York Bank, Compliance Department
The compliance officer stared at the screen, the patterns unmistakable even through the deliberately bland language of banking regulations. Wire transfers. Shell companies. Amounts that didn’t quite make sense for the stated business purposes.
She clicked through the transactions tied to firms associated with Hunter Biden and Devon Archer. The algorithm had flagged them weeks ago. Now, human eyes were confirming what the software suspected.
“File the SAR,” she told her supervisor. Suspicious Activity Report. The three words that could make a banker’s career or end it, depending on who was on the other end of the investigation.
The report went to FinCEN. From there, to the FBI. Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s closest business partner and fellow Burisma board member, would soon find himself under criminal investigation.
But Hunter Biden’s name would remain curiously absent from the initial indictments.
July 2015 - The West Wing, National Security Council
Eric Ciaramella walked through the security checkpoint with the practiced ease of someone who belonged. CIA badge. Top Secret clearance. A specialty in Ukraine and Russia that made him valuable in an administration obsessed with both.
He was being detailed from the Agency to the NSC, assigned to work on Ukraine policy under Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Adviser. More importantly, he’d be working closely with Vice President Biden’s office.
At 29 years old, Ciaramella was climbing fast. Yale educated. Fluent in Russian and Ukrainian. A registered Democrat who’d found a home in an administration that valued his particular expertise.
What he didn’t know yet was that he’d soon be at the center of not one, but two presidential impeachments—first as a witness to events, then as the catalyst for investigating them.
He unpacked his office that first day, hanging his credentials on the wall. Outside the window, the Rose Garden bloomed in summer heat.
November 15, 2015 - The White House, West Wing
Alexandra Chalupa signed in at the security desk, her visitor badge clipped to her blazer. The DNC’s opposition researcher on Trump and Russia didn’t usually get White House access, but today was different.
Eric Ciaramella had invited her.
Ali, as she was known, was a former Clinton administration staffer and had strong ties to the Ukrainian-American community
The meeting room held Ukrainian officials, White House staffers, advocates for increased Ukraine aid. Chalupa sat at the table, taking notes, building relationships, gathering intelligence that might later prove useful in linking Trump to Russia, to Ukraine, to anything that could damage his surging campaign.
“Thank you for arranging this,” she said to Ciaramella afterward, in the hallway outside the Situation Room.
“Of course,” he replied. “Ukraine needs all the friends it can get.”
What neither of them said aloud was that Trump was calling Ukraine policy corrupt, was questioning the billions in aid, was suggesting the Obama administration had its own problematic relationships in Kiev.
Four years later, those questions would bring down a presidency. But it wouldn’t be Obama’s.
December 1, 2015 - Kiev, Ukraine - Burisma Holdings Board Meeting
The conference room in Kiev’s Hilton Hotel overlooked Independence Square, where revolution had torn through the city just two years earlier. Now, different tensions filled the air.
Hunter Biden sat at the polished table as Mykola Zlochevsky, Burisma’s oligarch founder, laid out the company’s problems. Ukrainian prosecutors were circling. Asset seizures. Investigations. Pressure that threatened not just the company, but everyone associated with it.
“We need help,” Zlochevsky said in accented English. “American help.”
Vadym Pozharskyi, the advisor who’d met Joe Biden in Georgetown months earlier, nodded vigorously. “The pressure is constant. Government pressure. They are trying to destroy us.”
Hunter pulled out his phone. “Let me make some calls,” he said. “To D.C.”
Later, Devon Archer would testify before Congress about this moment. About Hunter, Zlochevsky, and Pozharskyi “calling D.C.” About the unspoken understanding of what that meant—and who in D.C. might actually answer.
December 7, 2015 - Aboard Air Force Two, En Route to Kiev
Eric Ciaramella sat in the staff cabin, reviewing briefing materials as Air Force Two descended toward Kiev. He was traveling with Vice President Biden on an official trip focused on anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine.
The irony wasn’t lost on him, though he kept his face neutral.
In the front cabin, Biden prepared for the confrontation to come. The message was simple, delivered with the subtlety of a brick through a window: Fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, or kiss the $1 billion in loan guarantees goodbye.
Ciaramella had expressed surprise—”Yikes,” he’d written in an email—when he first learned of the quid pro quo. But he was here now, part of the delegation, part of the process.
The plane touched down in Kiev’s winter darkness. Biden descended the stairs to waiting Ukrainian officials. The next six hours would determine billions in aid, the fate of a prosecutor, and the future of Hunter Biden’s most lucrative foreign business relationship.
December 7, 2015 - President’s Office, Kiev
“I’m leaving in six hours,” Joe Biden said, leaning forward in his chair across from Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.”
The translator rendered Biden’s words into Ukrainian. Poroshenko’s face remained impassive, but everyone in the room understood the calculation being made. One billion dollars. Ukraine’s economy was in free fall. Russian troops occupied the east. The country needed American support.
And America’s Vice President was making that support conditional on firing the sole prosecutor investigating Burisma: the company paying his son a million dollars a year.
“I understand,” Poroshenko said finally.
Biden smiled, stood, extended his hand. “I knew you would.”
Years later, at a Council on Foreign Relations event, Biden would tell this story with pride, laughing at the memory. “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”
The audience would laugh with him, unaware they were applauding a simple form of extortion.
February 18, 2016 - Hertz Rental Return, Prescott, Arizona
The Hertz employee walked around the silver sedan, clipboard in hand, checking for damage. Standard procedure. Return inspection.
Then she opened the door.
The crack pipe was in the center console. Unmistakable. Next to it, a driver’s license: Robert Hunter Biden. Credit cards in the same name. Personal effects scattered across the seats like evidence of a hasty departure or a complete breakdown.
She stepped back from the car, uncertain. This was above her pay grade. Way above.
“I need to get my manager,” she said to no one in particular.
The police were called. Then, mysteriously, the Secret Service became involved, even though Hunter Biden held no official position and was not entitled to protection.
The crack pipe disappeared into evidence. The incident disappeared into silence.
America wouldn’t learn about it until 2021, when Politico obtained the police report. By then, Hunter’s problems had become his father’s presidency’s constant shadow.
A dramatization of real events. Click here to start at Part I. Please see Miranda Devine’s book for the derivation of the term “Laptop from Hell”.
The entire Illustrated Spygate is available online! Don’t miss it.
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Looking back through it all is like traveling through Dante’s circles of hell. The evil machinations and manipulations are just off the charts.
For no one to ever go to jail for any of this and the great Russia Hoax would be an indelible stain on this country’s integrity forever.