Hunter Biden is a dangerous criminal, just like his father brain-dead Joe Biden. The “sweetheart deal” he got from the Justice Department and the hands-off attitude the FBI has shown him contrast with the political persecution of former President Trump. But so much is coming out about him that there is a chance he will go down and take his criminal father with him.
According to a story in May of last year on NBC News by Tom Winter, Sarah Fitzpatrick, Chloe Atkins, and Laura Strickler, “From 2013 through 2018 Hunter Biden and his company brought in about $11 million via his roles as an attorney and a board member with a Ukrainian firm accused of bribery and his work with a Chinese businessman now accused of fraud, according to an NBC News analysis of a copy of Biden’s hard drive and iCloud account and documents released by Republicans on two Senate committees.
The documents and the analysis, which don’t show what he did to earn millions from his Chinese partners, raise questions about national security, business ethics and potential legal exposure. In December 2020, Biden acknowledged in a statement that he was the subject of a federal investigation into his taxes. NBC News was first to report that an ex-business partner had warned Biden he should amend his tax returns to disclose $400,000 in income from the Ukrainian firm, Burisma. GOP congressional sources also say that if Republicans take back the House this fall, they’ll demand more documents and probe whether any of Biden’s income went to his father, President Joe Biden.
‘No government ethics rules apply to him,’ said Walter Shaub, a former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics who is now an ethics expert with the Project on Government Oversight. Shaub added, however, that ‘it’s imperative that no one at DOJ and no one at the White House interfere with the criminal investigation in Delaware.’ Shaub had previously raised questions about Hunter Biden’s new line of work, selling his own paintings, which created the potential to purchase a painting to buy perceived influence, and also because the White House became involved in the transactions, arranging that none of the buyers’ names be known to Biden, the White House or the public.
Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI’s former assistant director for counterintelligence, said there is a national security risk when foreign powers like China see an opportunity to get close to someone like Biden. ‘It’s all about access and influence, and if you can compromise someone with both access and influence, that’s even better,’ said Figliuzzi, now an NBC News contributor. ‘Better still if that target has already compromised himself.’
The documents and the analysis indicate that few of Biden’s deals ever came to fruition and shed light on how fast he was spending his money. Expenditures compiled on his hard drive show he spent more than $200,000 per month from October 2017 through February 2018 on luxury hotel rooms, Porsche payments, dental work and cash withdrawals.
Biden has admitted to burning through cash to pay for drugs and partying with strangers who routinely stole from him, and he struggled to pay multiple mortgages or keep up with alimony and child support payments to his ex-wife. In his autobiography, ‘Beautiful Things,’ he says the money from Burisma ‘turned into a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction’ and ‘hounded me to spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively. Humiliatingly. So I did.’
In a February 2017 divorce filing, an attorney for Biden’s ex-wife said the couple’s outstanding debts were ‘shocking and overwhelming’ and that they owed $313,000 in back taxes. According to the filing, they had bounced checks to their housekeeper and owed money to doctors and therapists. The filing alleged that Hunter Biden had spent copiously on drugs, strip clubs, prostitutes and girlfriends ‘while leaving the family with no money to pay legitimate bills.’
A representative for Biden says all of his tax responsibilities to the IRS are now satisfied. Two sources familiar with the matter have confirmed to NBC News that Hollywood attorney Kevin Morris began advising Biden in 2020 and arranged to pay off the approximately $2 million Biden owed the IRS.
Legal experts say, however, that paying the bill won’t relieve Biden of criminal liability or necessarily erase his debts.
NBC News analyst Chuck Rosenberg, a former Justice Department official, said that Biden’s paying what he owes could even be seen as an admission of criminal violations. Not paying taxes for many years, rather than one or two, Rosenberg said, helps establish intent, which can otherwise be a struggle for prosecutors in white-collar cases.
Paying the bill, Rosenberg said, might help Biden if he faced sentencing and ‘mitigate some of the damage, but it doesn’t undo the crime. That would be like returning money to a bank that you robbed. You still robbed the bank.’
Biden is represented by former federal prosecutor Christopher Clark in the ongoing criminal investigation in Delaware. Clark declined to comment on the record. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware declined to comment.
NBC News obtained a copy of Biden’s laptop hard drive from a representative of Rudy Giuliani and examined Biden’s business dealings from 2013 to 2018 based on the information available on the hard drive and the scope of the documents released by the Senate.
Biden made $5.8 million, more than half his total earnings from 2013 to 2018, from two deals with Chinese business interests.
Biden’s most lucrative business relationship was acting as a consultant in a project with a company that belongs to a once-powerful Chinese businessman who is now thought to be detained in his homeland.
According to business records referred to in the Senate report, Hudson West III, a venture funded by the Chinese oil and natural gas company CEFC and its chairman, Ye Jianming, paid $4,790,375.25 to Owasco P.C. over about one year.
Filings with the Washington, D.C., government show Owasco P.C. is controlled by Hunter Biden.
A review of the personal and corporate emails on Biden’s hard drive yield little information about any business he conducted on behalf of Hudson West III, and his autobiography doesn’t discuss his Chinese business dealings in any detail.
One of the few potential business opportunities discussed appears in a series of email exchanges among Biden, several U.S. partners and Chinese individuals associated with Hudson West III.
They talked about a potential gas deal on Monkey Island in Louisiana in 2017, but it appears no deal was made, and no publicly available documents indicate any sort of purchase, sale or agreement.
Britt Singletary, the attorney who conducted due diligence for the Monkey Island deal and another deal, told NBC News that ultimately the deals didn’t come together because they just didn’t make sense.
‘Financially, it wasn’t going to work,’ said Singletary, because the deals were too big and too risky for Hunter Biden, his uncle Jim Biden and their Chinese partners.
Citing attorney-client privilege, Singletary said he couldn’t discuss his advice on the deals to Hunter Biden, his uncle Jim or two Chinese employees of Hudson West III, Mervyn Yan and JiaQi Bao. He described Yan and Bao as ‘very smart’ and said two meetings occurred, one in Atlanta and one in New Orleans. Hunter Biden attended the meeting in New Orleans.
Singletary was counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1970s, where he met then-Sen. Joe Biden. Singletary says he believes he was chosen because Joe Biden and ultimately Hunter Biden knew he wouldn’t get the Chinese businesspeople or the Bidens into bad business deals.
In 2018, Chinese prosecutors accused Ye Jianming of ‘economic crimes,’ including alleged fraud and bribery, and detained him for questioning. He hasn’t been seen in public since.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington told NBC News, ‘We are not familiar with the case you mentioned, and I’m afraid we can’t offer information on this.’
According to the Republican Senate report, Hudson West III, CEFC and another firm were involved in certain transactions that were ‘among those identified as potential efforts to layer funds.’
The U.S. Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network describes the layering of funds as ‘separating the illegally obtained money from its criminal source by layering it through a series of financial transactions, which makes it difficult to trace the money back to its original source.’
Biden also appears to have done work for one of Ye’s business associates. Patrick Ho was convicted in U.S. federal court of bribing top officials in Chad and Uganda in pursuit of oil deals in those countries starting in September 2014. A jury found that Ho, while working for CEFC, bribed or attempted to bribe officials as much as $2 million. He was sentenced to three years in prison in March 2019 and then expelled from the U.S. at the end of his prison term.
Federal court filings and emails on Biden’s hard drive indicate Ho was employed by CEFC and was an associate of Ye. Ho worked on the failed Monkey Island project.
Hudson West wired Biden’s company, Owasco, $1 million from Hudson West III in March 2018 with a memo line for ‘Dr Patrick Ho Chi Ping Representation,’ according to the Senate report and emails on the Biden hard drive.
Now it has come out that the Burisma matter is much more serious. It appears that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden got bribes from Burisma: “President Joe Biden was allegedly paid $5 million by an executive of the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, where his son Hunter Biden sat on the board, a confidential human source told the FBI during a June 2020 interview, sources familiar told Fox News Digital.
The sources briefed Fox News Digital on the contents of the FBI-generated FD-1023 form alleging a criminal bribery scheme between then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national that involved influence over U.S. policy decisions.
The FD-1023 form, dated June 30, 2020, is the FBI’s interview with a ‘highly credible’ confidential source who detailed multiple meetings and conversations he or she had with a top Burisma executive over the course of several years, starting in 2015. Fox News Digital has not seen the form, but it was described by several sources who are aware of its contents.
An FD-1023 form is used by FBI agents to record unverified reporting from confidential human sources. The form is used to document information as told to an FBI agent, but recording that information does not validate or weigh it against other information known by the FBI.
The Burisma executive sought the advice of the confidential source, a business professional, on gaining U.S. oil rights and getting involved with a U.S. oil company, the sources familiar with the document said. The Burisma executive was speaking with the confidential source to ‘get advice on the best way to go forward’ in 2015 and 2016.
According to the FD-1023 form, the confidential human source said the Burisma executive discussed Hunter’s role on the board. The confidential human source questioned why the Burisma executive needed his or her advice in acquiring access to U.S. oil if he had Hunter Biden on the board. The Burisma executive answered by referring to Hunter Biden as ‘dumb.’
The Burisma executive explained to the confidential source that Burisma had to ‘pay the Bidens’ because Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was investigating Burisma, and explained how difficult it would be to enter the U.S. market in the midst of that investigation.
The confidential source further detailed that conversation, suggesting to the Burisma executive that he ‘pay the Bidens $50,000 each,’ to which the Burisma executive replied, it is ‘not $50,000,’ it is ‘$5 million.’
‘$5 million for one Biden, $5 million for the other Biden,’ the Burisma executive told the confidential human source, according to a source familiar with the document.
A source familiar said according to the document, the $5 million payments appeared to reference a kind of ‘retainer” Burisma intended to pay the Bidens to deal with a number of issues, including the investigation led by Shokin. Another source referred to the arrangement as a ‘pay-to-play’ scheme.
Sources familiar told Fox News Digital that the confidential human source believes that the $5 million payment to Joe Biden and the $5 million payment to Hunter Biden occurred, based on his or her conversations with the Burisma executive.
The confidential source said the Burisma executive told him he ‘paid’ the Bidens in such a manner ‘through so many different bank accounts’ that investigators would not be able to ‘unravel this for at least 10 years.’ The document then makes reference to ‘the Big Guy,’ which, has been said to be a reference to Joe Biden.
The Burisma executive told the confidential source that he ‘didn’t pay the Big Guy directly.’
Fox News Digital has learned that the confidential human source has been used by the FBI as a regular, reliable source of information since 2010 and has been paid approximately $200,000 by the bureau.
Sources said the Burisma executive appears to be at a ‘very, very high level’ of the company. One source familiar suggested the confidential source could be referring to the head of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, but said the name of the Burisma executive is redacted in the document.
Biden has acknowledged that when he was vice president, he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin. At the time, Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, and at the time, Hunter had a highly-lucrative role on the board receiving thousands of dollars per month. The then-vice president threatened to withhold $1 billion of critical U.S. aid if Shokin was not fired.”
Lew:
Tucker Carlson has already alluded to it, but this is how they will probably prevent Joe Biden from running in 2024.
Those classified documents in and of themselves are not enough to disqualify Biden from running.
But one or two classified documents tied directly to Hunter Biden’s activities with overseas clients involving either Ukraine or China should do the trick to disqualify ole Joe.
Especially when they find large sums of money involved in those transactions.
The beauty of it is neither the son nor the father because of their limited mental capacities would have had exact memories on the locations or import of those many classified documents floating around town.
They could have easily been planted by anyone.”
Let’s hope he is right. We must do everything we can to get the criminal Bidens out of our lives.