Reprinted with permission from Alternet
The name Burisma has often come up in connection with the impeachment of President Donald Trump, who on July 25, asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden — a former Burisma board member. And according to a bombshell report by the New York Times, intelligence officials for the Russian government have hacked Burisma (a Ukrainian natural gas company).
The likely motive for the hack, reported the Times, was a desire to get some dirt on the Bidens — which was what Trump, according to House Democrats, was looking for during his July 25 conversation with Zelensky. That conversation led to Trump being indicted on two articles of impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives in a December 18 vote: one for abuse of power, the other for obstruction of Congress.
According to Times reporters Nicole Perlroth and Matthew Rosenberg, “The hacking attempts against Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served, began in early November, as talk of the Bidens, Ukraine and impeachment was dominating the news in the United States.”
In Russia, President Vladimir Putin and his supporters are clearly hoping that Trump will be reelected in November, and they believe that Joe Biden — if he receives the Democratic presidential nomination — would be hostile to their interests.
Perlroth and Rosenberg report, “It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for. But the experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.”
According to the Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity firm Area 1, the Russian hackers managed to get into one of Burisma’s servers. Oren Falkowitz, co-founder of Area 1, told the New York Times that the hacking of Burisma recalls the hacking in 2016 of Democratic National Committee (DNC) e-mails.
“Once again,” Falkowitz told the Times, “they are stealing e-mail credentials in what we can only assume is a repeat of Russian interference in the last election.”
