In a real democracy—not the banana republic we’re becoming—intelligence agencies work for the people, not politicians. They gather information critical to our national security and share it with those who need to know—including the American public when appropriate. But what happens when those entrusted with our nation’s secrets decide that protecting a politician’s reputation matters more than the truth? What happens when the very agencies designed to inform our leaders instead become tools for covering up embarrassing realities?
For nearly a decade, the American people were denied critical intelligence about one of our nation’s most sensitive foreign relationships. The information wasn’t classified to protect sources and methods or national security—it was squashed to protect one man’s political image and his family’s questionable business dealings. Now, thanks to newly declassified documents from CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s transparency initiative, we’re finally learning what was hidden from us all along.
From ‘Fox News’:
Then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2015 told the CIA he would “strongly prefer” an intelligence report documenting Ukrainian officials’ concerns with his family’s ties to “corrupt” business deals in the country “not be disseminated” — and so it wasn’t, according to a newly declassified email and records made public by the agency.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe declassified the heavily redacted records, which he said he believes is an example of “politicization of intelligence.”
That email reveals how then-Vice President Joe Biden personally intervened to kill a CIA intelligence report documenting Ukrainian officials’ harsh assessment of his diplomatic efforts and their concerns about his family’s corrupt business ties in their country. The guy who’s been lecturing us about democracy actually killed intelligence reports like some tin-pot dictator. The report, which CIA analysts later determined met all thresholds for dissemination and would have been valuable to U.S. policymakers, was axed at Biden’s explicit request.
The suppressed intelligence painted an embarrassing picture of Biden’s December 2015 visit to Kyiv, where he delivered a speech condemning “the cancer of corruption” to the Ukrainian parliament. Behind closed doors, however, Ukrainian officials close to President Petro Poroshenko expressed “bewilderment and disappointment” that the American vice president had traveled across the Atlantic “almost exclusively to deliver a generic speech” rather than engage in substantive discussions about their country’s future.
What Ukrainian Officials Really Thought
The squashed CIA report exposed something far more damaging than diplomatic disappointment. Ukrainian officials “privately mused” about the glaring hypocrisy of Biden lecturing them about corruption while his own son, Hunter Biden, was collecting tens of thousands of dollars monthly from Burisma Holdings, one of Ukraine’s largest and most controversial natural gas companies. These officials viewed the Biden family’s business arrangements as “evidence of a double-standard within the United States Government towards matters of corruption and political power.”
The timing of Biden’s intervention is particularly telling. His request to bury the report came just months before he would famously threaten to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid unless Ukraine fired Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma at the time. Biden would later boast about this strong-arm tactic at the Council on Foreign Relations, declaring with characteristic bravado: “I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion… If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.” (Yes, he actually said “son of a bitch” while bragging about international extortion—class act, right?)
The Cover-up Unravels
According to senior CIA officials who briefed Fox News on these declassified documents, Biden’s request to suppress the intelligence report was “extremely rare and unusual.” They called it “inappropriate to go outside of the intelligence community and inquire with the White House on the dissemination of a particular report for what appears to be political reasons.” This wasn’t standard procedure—it was political manipulation of our intelligence apparatus.
Every American should be asking: What else has been hidden from us? What other intelligence reports were killed to protect political careers? And most importantly, how do we ensure this never happens again? The answers to these questions will determine whether we can restore trust in our government institutions or whether the swamp will simply wait out another administration before returning to business as usual. The swamp didn’t drain itself. It just learned to hide better. Until now.
Key Takeaways
• Biden personally killed a CIA report exposing Ukrainian criticism of his diplomacy
• Ukrainian officials saw Biden family’s Burisma deals as American hypocrisy
• The same Ukraine dealings that got Trump impeached were covered up by Biden
• CIA Director Ratcliffe’s declassifications reveal systematic intelligence politicization
Sources: Fox News, Real Clear Politics
