The Department of Justice has closed an investigation into Blue Star Strategies, an American lobby firm that worked for Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings, without finding any criminal wrongdoing, the Washington Post reports.
Blue Star’s involvement with the Ukrainian company was central to many of the conspiracy theories regarding Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, with uninformed conspiracists claiming that Blue Star coordinated with Hunter Biden to arrange meetings for officials within the Obama Administration in 2016.
Burisma paid Blue Star, a non-partisan lobbying firm, $60,000 to arrange meetings with Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, and administration officials to explain Burisma’s position relating to the ongoing corruption in the Ukrainian government.
Blue Star CEO, Karen Tramontano, told federal investigators and a Senate committee that her firm did not contact Hunter Biden to arrange the meetings, which is logical because if Hunter Biden, a Burisma board member at the time, had arranged the meetings for the owner of Burisma, the owner of Burisma would not have to have paid an outside firm.
Zlochevsky, the former ecology and natural resources minister under Ukrainian President Viktor F. Yanukovych, had wanted to assure US officials that the company was not undertaking corrupt activity in Ukraine, even as Ukrainian government officials were being arrested and charged with taking bribes.
The Obama Administration’s policy was that the US would withhold certain aid to Ukraine until the internal corruption of the Yanukovych regime was tamped down. Along with the US, a number of European nations also pushed Ukraine to reduce corruption, pointing to a team of federal investigators known as the “diamond prosecutors” who were widely known to be open bribes, specifically in the form of untraceable diamonds.
To settle the investigation, Blue Star Strategies and its CEO filed paperwork with the federal government to register as a foreign agent who did work for the company in 2015 and 2016. Their filings, summed up in court documents, explained the firm “was asked in 2016 to help schedule meetings with U.S. Government officials so counsel for Mr. Zlochevsky could present an explanation of certain adverse proceedings in the U.K. and Ukraine involving Mr. Zlochevsky.”