DC's Atlantic Council raked in funding from Hunter Biden's corruption-stained employer while courting his VP father

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"The company just does not pass the smell test," a businessman in Ukraine commented to the Financial Times. "Their reputation is far from squeaky clean because of their baggage, the background and attempts to whitewash by bringing in recognizable Western names on to the board."

In fact, a year before the Atlantic Council initiated its partnership with Burisma, the think tank published a paper describing Zlochevsky as "openly on the take" and deriding board members Hunter Biden and former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski as his "trophy foreigners." (Kwasniewski is today a member of the Atlantic Council's international advisory board).

For Herbst, however, Burisma's generosity seemed too hard to resist.

"If there are companies that want to support my work, if those companies are not doing anything that I know to be illegal or unethical, I'll consider their support," Herbst stated in reply to questions about the Burisma partnership from the Ukrainian news site, Hromadske.

"They've been good partners," he added.

Men of integrity

The Atlantic Council has provided more than just a web of influence for figures like Biden and Zlochevsky. It extended into the Trump administration, through a former employee who served as the president's lead envoy to Ukraine.

On the sidelines of a September 2018 Atlantic Council event in New York City, Burisma advisor Vadym Pozharskyi held a meeting with Kurt Volker, then the State Department Special Liaison to Ukraine. A former senior advisor to the Atlantic Council and national security hardliner, Volker had earned praise from Biden as a "solid guy."

At the time, Volker also served as the executive director of the McCain Institute, named for the senator, John McCain, who authored the congressional provision requiring the US to budget 20 percent of all aid to Ukraine for offensive weapons. As I reported in 2017, the McCain Institute's financial backers included the BGR group, whose designated lobbyist, Ed Rogers, was a lobbyist for Raytheon the company that produced the Javelin missiles that both Volker and the Atlantic Council wanted sold to Ukraine.

Following his abrupt resignation this September, Volker was called to testify before the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs on the so-called Ukrainegate affair. There, he defended Biden as "a man of integrity and dedication to our country" who would never be "influenced in his duties as Vice President by money for his son""

Biden's chief advisor on Ukraine goes to work for Burisma's favorite DC think tank

Throughout Biden's tenure as the "point person" on Ukraine, one figure was constantly by his side: Michael Carpenter, a former Pentagon specialist on Eastern Europe who became a key advisor to Biden on the National Security Council. When Carpenter traveled with Biden to Ukraine in 2015, he helped provide the Vice President with talking points throughout his trip.

Once Trump was inaugurated, Carpenter followed fellow members of the Democratic foreign policy apparatus into the think tank world. He accepted a fellowship at the Atlantic Council, and assumed a position as senior director of newly founded Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which provided office space to Biden when he was in Washington.

At the January 23, 2018 Council on Foreign Relations event where Biden made his now-notorious comments about threatening the Ukrainian government with the withdrawal of a one billion dollar loan if it did not fire Shokin "well son of a b*tch, he got fired!" Biden exclaimed Carpenter was by his side, rattling off tough talking points about Russian interference.

Since then, Carpenter has remained engaged in Ukrainian politics, throwing his weight behind some of the country's most hardline elements. In July 2018, for instance, he helped welcome Andriy Parubiy, the speaker of the Rada (the Ukrainian parliament), to a series of meetings on Capitol Hill.

Parubiy is the founder of the Social-National Party, which the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson described as "openly neo-fascist." In fact, Parubiy appeared in a Nazi-style uniform, packing a pistol beneath a Wolfsangel symbol on the cover of his Mein Kampf-style memoir, "A View From The Right."

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