NEW YORK POST
President Joe Biden’s role as “the brand” for son Hunter’s lucrative international influence-peddling may have benefited him directly, according to mounting evidence from the first son’s abandoned laptop.
Newly revealed bank records released by the House Oversight Committee show that the president’s family and allies hauled in a staggering $20 million from foreign sources in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and China, some of whom met personally with Biden while he served as vice president.
On Friday, Attorney General Merrick Garland named Delaware US Attorney David Weiss as special counsel in the ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings — and Joe Biden, 80, is facing further scrutiny as the Republican-led House of Representatives weighs potential impeachment proceedings against him.
“Joe Biden has been a public official for five decades yet has lived lavishly,” House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) told The Post. “As Hunter Biden was sealing deals with Russian, Kazakhstani, and Ukrainian oligarchs, then-Vice President Biden dined with them in DC. This reeks of corruption.”
At least nine Biden family members allegedly got payouts from the huge pool of cash — for no discernible business reason, investigators have said.
The probe has uncovered no direct payments to the president himself, but emails from Hunter’s left-behind laptop hint that his father may have shared in the bounty, say congressional Republicans and former Biden associates.
“It’s vacations, cell phones, money to pay taxes,” a former Biden family business partner told The Post. “This is Joe Biden’s brother and sister and his children and grandchildren taking care of him.”
Paying the veep’s bills
The laptop Hunter Biden left in a Delaware computer repair shop — authenticated, but suppressed, by the FBI — revealed a string of self-pitying emails and text messages to family members in which he claimed to have been kicking up to 50% of his income back to his father for decades.
“I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years. It’s really hard,” he groused to daughter Naomi in a January 2019 text message that took direct aim at “Pop” — Joe Biden.
“But don’t worry, unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary,” Hunter snarked.
In 1996, at age 26, Hunter took a cushy banking job with MBNA — a Delaware credit-card company that was his senator father’s top political supporter — because, he complained, he was expected to pay off both his and brother Beau Biden’s college and post-graduate loans.
“Dad never paid one dime for room boarding books summer classes,” Hunter vented in a December 2016 email to his aunt Valerie Biden Owens, Joe’s sister.
“Being a corporate lawyer was the antithesis of what I’d thought I’d be doing,” he griped in his 2021 memoir “Beautiful Things.” “But … I had to make money.”
By 2010, laptop emails show, Hunter was routinely paying Vice President Biden’s household expenses, with longtime business partner Eric Schwerin, president of Hunter’s Chinese-linked investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners, serving as the go-between.
“There a few outstanding bills that need to be paid and I am not sure which ones are a priority and which should get paid out of ‘my’ account,” Schwerin wrote to Hunter in a June 5, 2010 email with the heading “JRB Bills.”
“There is about $2,000 extra in ‘my’ account beyond what is used for monthly expenses,” he explained.
The bills in question included several relating to the upkeep of Joe Biden’s sprawling 6,850-square-foot lakefront mansion in the wealthy Greenville enclave of Wilmington, Del.: $1,239 in repairs to an air conditioner at “Mom-Mom’s cottage” on the grounds of the 4-acre estate; $1,475 to a local house painter for “back wall and columns”; $2,600 for a “stone retaining wall”; and $475 for shutters.
A 2016 tally of monthly bills set up to be automatically paid out of Hunter Biden’s bank account included $190 for “AT&T (JRB)” — apparently a cell phone for Joe Biden’s private use.
At one point, Hunter claimed his father “has been using most lines” of a Wells Fargo credit account – “which I’ve through the gracious offerings of Eric have paid for the past 11 years.”
“They go out to lunch in DC, Hunter picks up the tab,” the former Biden associate said. “Is that Joe Biden receiving money from the Chinese Communist Party? In my book it is. But it gives them a level of obfuscation, which is something they have mastered over 50 years.”
“It’s classic influence peddling,” Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch told The Post. “The evidence is that it wasn’t just a matter of Joe allowing his son to inappropriately use his name, but the money was flowing and according to significant FBI evidence it went directly to Joe Biden.”
At the time, Schwerin was a frequent White House visitor — dropping in at the executive mansion and the Naval Observatory in Washington at least 36 times between 2009 and 2016, when Biden served as veep to President Barack Obama.
Schwerin is cooperating with the House investigation, sources told The Post, and has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
“There was this terrible corruption issue in the Obama administration that was hidden which could have been catastrophic politically for them,” Fitton said. “Had it been widely known what Joe and Hunter were up to while he was vice president, he would have been drummed out … He would have been Spiro Agnew 2.0.”
The commingled family finances also caused some embarrassing mix-ups – as when Hunter Biden used a shared account to transfer about $25,000 to a Los Angeles prostitute named “Gulnora.”
He soon received a series of agitated text messages from a former Secret Service agent who repeatedly reminded him, “This is linked to Celtic’s account” — referring to Joe Biden by his vice-presidential code name.
“His future earnings potential”
As early as 2010, Hunter Biden and Schwerin were discussing how to monetize the veep once his term ended in in 2017, emails show.
In a July 6, 2010 message headed “JRB Future Memo,” Schwerin asked, “Does it make sense to see if your Dad has some time in the next couple of weeks while you are in DC to talk about it? … he could use some positive news about his future earnings potential!”
Four months after Joe Biden returned to private life, James Gilliar, another Hunter business partner, emailed details of a lucrative partnership with CEFC China Energy — a company closely tied to the Chinese Communist Party — with 10% of the equity “held by H for the big guy?”
Former Hunter Biden associate Tony Bobulinski has said he met with the elder Biden in May 2017 to discuss the venture — and both he and Gilliar have separately identified Joe Biden as “the big guy.”
“I’ve seen Vice President Biden saying he never talked to Hunter about his business,” Bobulinski said in 2020. “I’ve seen firsthand that that’s not true, because it wasn’t just Hunter’s business, they said they were putting the Biden family name and its legacy on the line.”
Last month, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley released a bombshell FBI file in which a trusted confidential informant described a $10 million bribery allegation made against Joe and Hunter Biden by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of natural gas company Burisma Holdings.
“It cost 5 [million] to pay one Biden, and 5 [million] to another Biden,” Zlochevsky allegedly told the longtime federal source in 2016.
House investigators have identified five foreign flows of questionable cash in their examination of Hunter Biden’s network of more than 20 shell companies:
- $8.1 million from China’s CCP-linked State Energy HK and CEFC China Energy in 2017
- $6.5 million from Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings from 2014 to 2019
- $3.5 million from Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, the former first lady of Moscow, in 2014
- $3.1 million from Romanian oligarch Gabriel Popoviciu from 2015 to 2017
- $142,300 from Kazakhstan’s Kenes Rakishev in 2014 – transferred by Hunter a day later to a New Jersey car dealership for the purchase of a luxury sports car
And the investigation, Comer said, is continuing.
“This is always going to end with the Bidens coming in front of the committee,” he said Thursday. “We are going to subpoena the family … bank records don’t lie.”
A “very powerful name”
In congressional testimony last month, former Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer said Joe Biden was never “overtly” used as leverage in the pair’s business dealings — but that Hunter regularly invoked his father’s “very powerful name” to “add value.”
“Obviously, that brought the most value to the brand,” Archer said. “It was Hunter Biden and him.”
The “brand” appears to have paid off big for some of the Bidens’ foreign friends.
Multiple Russian oligarchs were hit with US sanctions following Moscow’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and its 2022 invasion of Ukraine – but “notably, Yelena Baturina is not on that list,” Comer’s committee wrote in this week’s release.
Archer testified that Hunter huddled with Burisma executives and “called DC” to get the Obama administration to oust Viktor Shokin, a troublesome prosecutor who was investigating the company. Soon after, Shokin was fired when then-Vice President Joe Biden threatened to yank $1 billion in American aid if he remained on the job.
And last month House Republicans demanded an explanation for the sale of 900,000 barrels of oil from America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a subsidiary of Sinopec — a Chinese-owned gas company that in 2015 received a $1.7 billion investment from an equity firm controlled by the first son.
On Monday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy called on President Biden to “give us his bank statements” as Republicans prepare to launch an impeachment inquiry in the coming weeks.
“I think there’s enough proof out there that this Biden family needs to come forward and show there wasn’t a pay to play,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said.
