While Joe Biden publicly led the charge to punish Russia for its first invasion of Ukraine, he used his role as vice president to quietly open a backdoor for Moscow's gas to flow to its neighbor in fall 2014, at a time when his son Hunter's Ukrainian energy company sought such help, according to government messages in a private email account kept from Americans for more than a decade.

The emails, sent to Joe Biden's private account that used the fake name RobinWare456@gmail.com, were recently turned over by the National Archives, mostly redacted, to Just the News under an open records lawsuit and in unredacted form to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee that continues to investigate corruption concerns surrounding the former first family.

They confirm that Joe Biden played a secret role at a "critical moment" to help secure Russia's willingness to re-open natural gas spigots to Ukraine, a deal that publicly Germany and its then-chancellor, Angela Merkel, received credit for brokering.

Joe Biden's intervention getting the deal done

“Ukraine gas deal was just signed. The Germans earlier indicated to Tony that your call had come at a critical moment,”  the vice president’s Deputy National Security Advisor Jeffrey Prescott wrote in an Oct. 30, 2014 email to Joe Biden’s private account that appears to reference then-Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, a longtime Biden confident who would later serve as Biden's chief diplomat during the 46th presidency.

“Amos (with an assist here internally from your team) was critical to the endgame,” Prescott added, likely referring to Amos Hochstein, one of Biden’s trusted advisers at the State Department on energy who later interacted with Hunter Biden on several occasions related to Burisma and Ukraine, Just the News previously reported. 

Just six days before this communication, German Chancellor Merkel had called Putin directly, urging him to reach a settlement with Kyiv to resume gas flows before winter, German news site DW reported. 

The email sent to Joe Biden's private, fake-name address was handed over to Congress and obtained by Just the News, which was previously given a redacted version by the National Archives. 

You can read the full email and redacted version from the National Archives below:

Joe Biden's intervention in the gas deal with Moscow stood in stark contrast to the actions and rhetoric that he and his boss, then-President Barack Obama, delivered publicly after Russia invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula in early 2014. The two repeatedly sanctioned Russia's oil companies after the invasion and Joe Biden personally traveled to Kyiv in spring 2014 to implore Ukraine to “reduce its energy dependence” and offer American assistance in achieving that goal.

Public statements, private doings

Former President Biden has an ongoing record of his rhetoric conflicting with his actions, especially when it comes to Russia. Just months after taking office, he waived all sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany in an attempt to rebuild relations with Germany after having previously opposed the $11 billion project over fears Russia could exploit gas supplies to leverage Germany and the rest of Europe.

The political clamoring over Ukraine’s gas supplies masked a painful truth: Ukraine would need years to wean itself of Moscow's energy supply. Hunter Biden correctly identified that shortcoming in an email he sent to his business partner Devon Archer in April 2014, the same month his father gave the energy independence speech in Ukraine. About to join the board and secure a lucrative legal representation deal with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden warned Archer a shutdown of Russian gas exports to Ukraine would put a horrible squeeze on their new employer.

“There is no immediate supplier solution to replace [Russia],” the younger Biden added, warning that even if Burisma were to increase “output from its reserves by 100%...[Ukraine] would still be about 35% short of their needed gas supplies," the younger Biden wrote Archer in an email turned over to Congress in 2023 by two IRS whistleblowers.

At first glance, it might seem counterintuitive that a Ukrainian energy company would want Russia to continue exporting its gas supply to Ukraine. But Hunter Biden explained to his colleague the short-term benefit of keeping Russian gas flowing. “There will be enormous pressure on Burisma to lower prices for the national good. Even if the company takes a hit in profits it would seem imprudent to raise prices in concert with [Russian] price gouging,” he wrote.

You can read that email below:

Neither the State Department nor a lawyer for Hunter Biden responded to requests for comment from Just the News.

By summer 2014, Russia played hardball and shut off gas supplies to Ukraine, setting off a frantic scramble among European diplomats to find a solution. Inside Burisma, the shutoff, combined with an effort by the Ukrainian parliament to raise gas taxes to fund a drive for energy independence, posed a major threat to Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky.

Pressure to drop Burisma investigation

At the time, Zlochevsky’s Burisma was facing a criminal probe from the Ukrainian government, according to a legal defense plan formulated in June 2014 by Hunter Biden’s law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner. That plan was previously obtained by Just the News and showed an extensive effort to build pressure in Washington – from the State Department to Congress – to get Ukrainians to drop the probe after Biden and Archer were hired as board members.

The email shows Biden was worried that any turn of public opinion against the Ukrainian oligarch or his company could spark the authorities to kick their probe into overdrive, endangering their business opportunity, “the break we have been waiting for,” according to the email.

“And it is in the moment (btw now and Elections) that he needs to weather,” Biden warned. “If he is seen as unfairly profiting from the [Russian] induced price spike things could turn against him fast.” 

During that summer, as the frigid Eastern European winter grew on the horizon, President Obama acknowledged that sanctions on Russia for seizing Crimea would have to be tailored to avoid cutting off all Russian gas exports to Ukraine and Europe. More broadly, it represented a crack in the plan to win Ukraine its energy independence.

“Energy flows from Russia to Europe -- those continued even in the midst of the Cold War, at the height of the Cold War,” Obama said in a press conference with German Chancellor Merkel. “So the idea that you're going to turn off the tap on all Russian oil or natural gas exports I think is unrealistic.”

Vice President Biden later that fall acknowledged the United States’ role in securing the Russia-Ukraine gas deal.

“Ukraine risked another crisis this winter. But through skillful European mediation and active U.S. engagement, Russia and Ukraine reached an agreement that will keep the gas flowing this winter,” Biden said in an Atlantic Council Summit held in Istanbul in November 2024.

The Russian embassy did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News. The German Embassy in the United States declined to comment on the record. 

Burisma’s lobbying efforts 

Emails obtained by Just the News show that Hunter Biden and his partners, including Archer, were monitoring the gas export and sanctions situation in Ukraine and working with Burisma’s Washington-based lobbyist throughout the summer and fall of 2014, in the months leading up to the gas deal. 

The emails suggest that Hunter Biden may have received a personal call from the Secretary of State just days before the deal was signed, according to the materials provided by the IRS whistleblowers. On Oct. 27, 2014, Hunter Biden’s assistant Katie Dodge sent him an email titled “Secretary of State may be calling you soon.” 

Earlier, in May, Archer sent Biden a New York Times article about a plan to circumvent Russia’s state-owned enterprise, Gazprom, by exporting gas supplies to Ukraine from Europe, according to an email from the Hunter Biden laptop obtained by Just the News.   

“A plan to skirt Russia’s state energy behemoth, Gazprom, by reverse-flowing natural gas into Ukraine has been hindered by reticence from neighboring Slovakia, seemingly due to pressure from the Russian company,” Archer wrote to Biden and Heather King of Boies.

Another email shows the pair monitoring Burisma lobbyist David Leiter’s efforts to persuade U.S. officials to intervene as Ukraine considered legislation to raise taxes on private gas producers in the country. Leiter is the former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the Department of Energy in the Clinton administration and former President of ML Strategies, the firm Burisma hired. 

"Thanks for sharing the info about these newest legislative initiatives which could cause even more damage to the private gas industry in Ukraine. We will do our best to alert U.S. officials who might be able to influence Ukraine to not adopt such harmful measures,” Leiter wrote to Vadim Pozharskyi, a senior Burisma executive, according to the whistleblowers’ timeline. Archer forwarded this communication to Hunter Biden on Sept. 24, 2014.

Then, Biden met with Frank Mermoud, the former U.S. Special Representative for Commercial and Business Affairs at the State Department from 2002 to 2009, on Sept. 29, according to a calendar invite recorded by the IRS whistleblowers. One day after the meeting, Mermoud thanked Biden for the meeting and offered “...further discussion on ways in which my international advisory firm of Orpheus could be additive to your efforts -- particularly given my previous USG experience at State.” 

The same day, Mermoud forwarded to Biden with a detailed analysis of the political situation in Ukraine, including an update on the gas talks. 

These contacts are some of the earliest recorded, suggesting that Hunter Biden was intimately involved in the process of building a persuasion campaign in Washington to support Burisma begun under the aegis of his law firm employer. 

The campaign, detailed in a 58-page plan by Boies Schiller & Flexner, included contacting key State Department officials, like Amos Hochstein, “to brief them on who Burisma is, its significance to the future of Ukraine, and the Investigation in order to seek their advice and assistance; focus on why a legal challenge and/or a taking of Burisma's licenses is detrimental to both U.S. and Ukrainian national interests.”

That single declaration in the memo caught congressional investigators' attention during the Biden impeachment inquiry last year because Democrats had repeatedly claimed the Ukrainian energy company—which employed Hunter Biden as a board member—was not under scrutiny when then-Vice President Joe Biden sought the firing of the country’s lead prosecutor in 2015, and linked that demand to a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee for the struggling post-revolution government in Kyiv. That turned out to be false.

Devon Archer, longtime business partner of Hunter Biden and fellow Burisma board member, told Just the News on Monday that the Ukrainian gas company was desperate to survive and appointed Biden to the board for that reason and said he would not be surprised if they asked his friend to engage in lobbying efforts in Washington.

“But one thing I do know is that Burisma would do just about anything to survive, and one of those things was putting the vice president's son on the board, and I think they did that very effectively,” Archer told the Just the News, No Noise TV show.

“Regardless of the scrutiny that they got internally, they ended up having, you know, the prosecutor fired, I would not put it past Burisma to ask Hunter and his team, you know, to, you know, make calls on legislation,” he said.

With regard to whether Burisma wanted Russian oil to flow freely into Ukraine during that pivotal late 2014 period, Archer said, “It was certainly something that we weren't aware of as board members, but, you know, given the kind of history and track record of their, you know, sheer desire for survival, if that was going to help them profit—that was what they were in the business [for]—profit and survival.”