We now know that the anti-Trump State Department knew about the shady Biden-Burisma connections and were desperate to monitor Biden’s conservative critics. This revelation comes in 116 pages of records from the State Department that include a briefing checklist of a February 22, 2019, meeting in Kyiv between then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and Sally Painter, co-founder and chief operating officer of Blue Star Strategies, a Democratic lobbying firm which was hired by Burisma Holdings to combat corruption allegations. The briefing checklist notes that Painter also planned to meet with Foreign Commercial Service (FCS) Officer Martin Claessens “regarding the Burisma Group energy company.” (Painter was implicated in the Clinton-era fundraising scandal we exposed that involved the alleged sale of seats on Commerce Department trade missions to Democratic National Committee donors.) We received the records in response to our FOIA lawsuit in January 2020 seeking records of communications from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv mentioning Burisma (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:20-cv-00229)).