Newly declassified emails show the State Department revoked the visa of a Ukrainian witness two weeks before the 2020 election, blocking him from testifying to a Senate investigation into alleged Biden family corruption tied to Ukraine.
The documents, released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), were first reported by investigative journalist Catherine Herridge. They show the witness was former Ukraine embassy aide Andrii Telizhenko, who was set to be interviewed by Johnson and Grassley in September 2020 as part of their probe into Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.
A State Department email cited in the records reads: “..to follow up on the Telezhinko (sic) visa, we revoked it earlier this month because he was imminently getting on a plane and needed to move quickly…”
Instead of appearing before the Senate, Telizhenko was sanctioned after being described as a possible unwitting source of Russian disinformation against the Biden family.
According to Herridge’s reporting, an unnamed administration official said the FBI and intelligence community “weren’t checking if allegations were true, they were suffocating anti-Biden Ukraine narrative.”
Part of a Broader Pattern
The records point to several other episodes investigators say fit the same pattern:
- IRS agents assigned to the Hunter Biden laptop investigation, including the Burisma angle, say they were blocked from pursuing leads tied to the “Big Guy.”
- Fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter claiming the laptop had the “classic earmarks” of a Russian information operation — months after the FBI had already authenticated it.
- FBI headquarters appears to have slow-walked other investigations into the Biden family.
- Grassley and Johnson received what is described as an “offensive briefing” from the FBI about Russian disinformation, which investigators say was designed to derail the Hunter Biden probe.
The declassified material also raises the possibility of circular reporting, in which government officials or their proxies plant information with a reporter, who publishes it — after which the same officials cite the published story to justify further investigative steps.
What the Documents Add
In a report published on Just the Facts, Steven Richards and John Solomon detail how the visa revocation was carried out even though U.S. intelligence showed Telizhenko was an opponent of Russia who had rejected overtures from Moscow. The documents were made public by the White House Government Transparency Task Force.
Evidence made public since the 2020 election also shows that senior U.S. diplomats in Kyiv believed Hunter Biden’s presence on Burisma’s board had “undercut” American anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine, and that then-Vice President Joe Biden overruled career officials who had recommended tying loan guarantees to the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor.
Grassley and Johnson have indicated their investigation is continuing.
