FILE – In this Oct. 11, 2012, file photo, Hunter Biden waits for the start of the his father’s, Vice President Joe Biden’s, debate at Centre College in Danville, Ky. In 2014, then-Vice President Joe Biden was at the forefront of American diplomatic efforts to support Ukraine’s fragile democratic government as it sought to fend off Russian aggression and root out corruption. So it raised eyebrows when Biden’s son Hunter was hired by a Ukrainian gas company. President Donald Trump prodded Ukraine’s president to help him investigate any corruption related to Joe Biden, now one of the top Democrats seeking to defeat Trump in 2020. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

Now unlike the junior senator from Utah, Mitt Romney who voted to convict President Donald Trump when it came to Senate impeachment trial, we don’t make judgements without the evidence to support them.

So we’d like to present a data point with no judgement as to what it might mean or if it means anything at all.

We just note it as an interesting fact in the whole calculus of everything that has been going on.

At the center of a lot of the storm surrounding impeachment was the question of the Hunter Biden relationship with Burisma and the conflict of interest it presented with his father Joe Biden, the then-Vice President, being the Obama administration point man on Ukraine.

President Donald Trump was impeached but acquitted after he inquired of President Volodymyr Zelensky if the “Biden investigation,” meaning the investigation the Ukrainians had been looking at involving Burisma, was properly dropped. The concern about whether there was corruption in the process was among other reasons because of a video of Joe Biden admitting that he threatened to withhold aid/loan guarantees from Ukraine if they didn’t fire the prosecutor. The prosecutor reportedly raided the home of the head of Burisma on February 2, 2016, according to the Kyiv Post. The prosecutor was fired in March, 2016.

Hunter Biden served on the Burisma board from April 2014 until the spring of 2019.

Joseph Cofer Black, who goes by Cofer Black, was appointed to the Burisma board in February 2017, so overlapping with Hunter Biden being on the board. Cofer Black appears to still be on the board, according to PJ Media, he’s listed on their website. According to the Federalist,

web archives show them serving on the board together.

NPR noted that had been investigations and questions about Burisma prior to the appointment of Biden or Cofer Black.

In spring 2014, the company appointed Hunter Biden and a former Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, to its board. Three years later, Burisma added Cofer Black, a former CIA official and foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, to the board. “I believe the only reason Burisma and Zlochevsky were inviting people with such names was to whitewash their reputation and to present themselves as a company doing legitimate business in Ukraine,” says Daria Kaleniuk, head of the nongovernmental Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv.

According to PJ Media:

Mr. Black joined the CIA in 1974, eventually becoming director of the National Counterterrorism Center in 1999. He was appointed as ambassador at large and coordinator for counterterrorism by President George W. Bush in 2002 and later worked at Blackwater as a vice-chairman before joining Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign as a “special adviser” on Romney’s Foreign Policy and National Security Advisory Team.

Now there’s nothing wrong with appointing people to burnish your reputation.

The question, as Republican senators are asking, is if there was anything more than that in relation to Hunter Biden, given his father’s position at the the time.

Maybe it proves the old maxim about everything or everyone being interconnected when it comes to politics when there is someone who was a top advisor to Romney on the board of Burisma.