The White House Government Transparency Task Force on Friday released State Department emails and memos that call into question the testimony of key 2019 Trump impeachment witnesses. 

Yesterday, Just the News published a report showing that former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and her aides were kept informed about corruption concerns at Burisma Holdings and about the company’s efforts to improve its image and win U.S. favor during the time that the vice president's son, Hunter Biden, served on its board. She later prevaricated about any recollection of such concerns in congressional testimony.

It was allegations of corruption by the Bidens in which President Donald Trump was interested when he asked Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into it. His conduct on that phone call precipitated the impeachment. 

The whistleblower who triggered the impeachment harbored a political bias against Trump

The records appear to conflict with Yovanovitch’s testimony as well as that of her chief deputy, George Kent, who was also an impeachment witness. 

The documents follow another major revelation earlier this year that the whistleblower who triggered the impeachment harbored a political bias against Trump, but the Intelligence Community Inspector General covered it up. 

Here are five of the biggest setbacks to the 2019 Ukraine impeachment narrative:

1. “It just wasn’t a big deal.”
That was how former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch described the Biden-Burisma matter in her Oct. 11, 2019, deposition. But the White House records, together with other documents Just the News obtained through open-records litigation, show that Yovanovitch and her top aides exchanged dozens of communications from 2016 to 2019 about Burisma, Hunter Biden, Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky, and the work of the company’s lawyers and lobbyists.

2. “I don’t recall that I was briefed on that.”
Yovanovitch testified that she did not recall embassy staff briefing her on Burisma after she arrived in Kyiv. In August 2017, however, an embassy employee forwarded her a one-page memo on the criminal case against Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky. The memo described FBI investigative support that traced almost $13 million moving through U.S. financial institutions. Her deputy had also warned her in September 2016 that Burisma had hired Blue Star Strategies, a firm with Democratic ties, and had put Hunter Biden on its board. 

3. Burisma was pursuing the ambassador directly.
In February 2017, Deputy Chief of Mission George Kent told Yovanovitch that Burisma’s “campaign of engagement” was continuing. He was forwarding a meeting request from Cofer Black, a new Burisma board member. The release also contains an April 2017 letter from Yovanovitch to Black, though it is not clear whether it was ever sent. In January 2018, Kent forwarded a request from Blue Star to meet the ambassador about issues that included a visa matter.

4. Kent: Reversed himself on Hunter Biden’s role impacting U.S. policy.
In November 2019, an investigator asked Kent whether a conflict of interest had influenced Obama administration policy on Ukraine and Burisma. Kent answered, “In my view, no.” However, three years earlier, on Nov. 22, 2016, Kent had written that someone in Washington needed to tell Biden quietly that his son’s seat on the Burisma board “undercut” the anti-corruption message the U.S. was promoting in Ukraine.

5. Biden changed U.S. policy in his push to fire Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the company for whom his son worked.
The vice president’s December 2015 visit to Kyiv has been the subject of much scrutiny surrounding Hunter Biden’s business dealings with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. It was on that trip that Vice President Biden called for Ukraine to fire its chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. The vice president threatened to withhold a substantial U.S. loan guarantee if not. At the time, Shokin was probing Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, for corruption. His son, Hunter, had just officially joined the board of the company in May 2014. 

The narrative during the 2019 impeachment was that Biden was carrying out official U.S. policy. However, documents later uncovered by Just the News show that the U.S. government had approved of the reforms Shokin was making to combat corruption in the prosecutors’ office and recommended approving the loan guarantee. 

The Washington Post fact-checker then confirmed Biden may have indeed “called an audible,” or changed the plan, on the firing of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin on his way to Kyiv aboard Air Force Two in December 2015.

6. The whistleblower’s potential biases were kept from House investigators.

Earlier this year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence alleged that a former U.S. intelligence community inspector general helped “manufacture a conspiracy” that led to the impeachment proceeding against President Donald Trump in 2019. 

The declassified memos written by investigators for now-former intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who first handled the CIA analyst's complaint, flagged the Ukraine whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, for having a "potential for bias." The memo elicited an apology from Ciaramella for misleading the probe about his prior contact with staffers on the Democrat-led House Intelligence Committee, admitted he criticized GOP congressmen, recounted that he asked to hide his complaint from Republicans on the intelligence committee, pointed to his close links to then-Vice President Joe Biden’s efforts in Ukraine, and more. 

More documents may call into question the credibility or reliability of key testimonies used in the proceedings as the White House Government Transparency Task Force continues its paper chase.