Report: 'Smoking gun' email shows Joe Biden met with top Burisma exec while he was VP, contradicting own claims

A newly obtained email purportedly reveals that Joe Biden met with a top executive at Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company, when he was vice president and during his son Hunter Biden's tenure on the company's board, the New York Post reported Wednesday.

The meeting allegedly happened less than a year before Biden admittedly pressured Ukrainian leaders to fire a top government prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.

What are the details?

According to Post, the "smoking gun" email shows that Hunter Biden allegedly brokered a meeting between his father and Vadym Pozharskyi, whom the Post reported was Burisma's "No. 3 exec," in April 2015.

From the Post:

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.

"Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It's realty [sic] an honor and pleasure," the e-mail reads.

According to the Post, the meeting happened about one year after Pozharskyi asked Hunter Biden, in a May 2014 email, for "advice on how you could use your influence" to benefit Burisma.

Less than eight months after the alleged meeting, Biden pressured then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko into firing Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma. Biden has since admitted he threatened to withhold U.S. money from Ukraine if Shokin was not fired.

Biden infamously recounted his threat to Poroshenko during a Council on Foreign Relations event in 2018.

"I said, 'You're not getting the billion,'" Biden explained. "I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.'"

"Well, son of a bitch, he got fired," Biden bragged. "And they put in place someone who was solid at the time."

Why is this significant?

Joe Biden maintains that he has "never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings."

Pozharskyi's email directly contradicts Biden's claim. In fact, Hunter Biden even admitted last year that he discussed his overseas business dealings with his father at least "once."

Still, the former vice president has denied any wrongdoing.

How did the Post obtain the email?

According to the Post, the email was extracted from a laptop that was dropped off at a computer repair store in the Bidens' home state of Delaware in April 2019. The MacBook Pro computer was water-damaged, but its owner never returned to the store for the device, the store's owner told the Post.

The store's owner was not able to positively identify the owner of the computer, but said a Beau Biden Foundation sticker was on the outside of the device. Also located on the computer's hard drive were personal and explicit photographs of Hunter Biden, the paper said.

The store owner later alerted federal authorities to the laptop's existence. The FBI seized the laptop and a hard drive in December 2019, according federal court subpoena obtained by the Post.

However, prior to handing over the computer, the store owner made a copy of the computer's hard drive and gave it to the lawyer of Rudy Giuliani. The Post was alerted to the existence of the hard drive last month by Steve Bannon, and Giuliani gave the Post a copy of the hard drive over the weekend.