President Joe Biden was involved in his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings at least 17 times over ten years, records from Hunter’s “laptop from hell” and reports show.
Though Joe Biden and his staff have claimed at least seven times that the president has not been involved in the family business, 17 pieces of evidence suggest Joe Biden has played an influential role in his son Hunter and brother James’s activities. Fifty-eight percent of voters believe that Joe Biden has played a role in his family’s business. Sixty percent say Hunter Biden has sold “influence and access” to the president.
One:
In 2012, Vice President Joe Biden met with Eric Schwerin, the former president of the investment fund Rosemont Seneca Partners — which Hunter Biden co-founded — and former Colombian President Andrés Pastrana Arango at the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s residence, on March 2, 2012, the New York Post reported.
Two:
In 2013, Hunter flew to China with Vice President Joe Biden aboard Air Force Two. During the excursion, Hunter introduced the vice president to his business partner Jonathan Li, the CEO of a company linked to Chinese oil interests to which the Biden administration reportedly sold 950,000 barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve in 2022.
China issued Hunter’s firm a business license ten days after the visit. The firm also won a $1 billion investment from a state-owned financial institution, the New York Post reported:
Ten days later, Hunter’s company inked a deal with the state-owned Bank of China and created the $1 billion investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), according to reporting by Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and the best-selling author of “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.”
A representative for BHR told The New Yorker in July 2019 that Hunter Biden introduced his father to Chinese private equity executive Jonathan Li during the trip. Li later became the CEO of BHR.
Three:
Photos from 2014 reveal that Joe Biden met with Hunter’s Mexican business associates, billionaire Miguel Alemán Velasco and his son Miguel Aleman Magnani, in the vice president’s office.
“The then-vice president also flew Hunter and his partner Jeff Cooper on Air Force 2 to Mexico City in 2016 where Hunter arranged to meet Alemán’s son for meetings over a ‘flippin gigantic’ business deal,” the Daily Mail reported.
Four:
In 2014, a photo shows Joe Biden golfing with Hunter and Devon Archer, Hunter’s fellow board member at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Archer is now in prison for fraud.
“The photograph includes a fourth man who has not been identified. However, he is not Burisma’s top executive Taras Burdeinyi or founder Mykola Zlochevsky. Photographs of both men can be seen here and here,” Reuters reported.
Five:
Emails from 2015 show that Hunter and Joe Biden met with Francis Person, who was a former adviser to the vice president. Person became president of the Harves Group after leaving Joe Biden’s office in 2014.
“According to Person’s Linkedin, which was recently deleted within the last couple weeks, he ‘[h]elped guide the formation of the Harves Group headquartered in Washington DC, serving as the U.S. affiliate of Harves [Century Group],’ a ‘top tier private chinese real estate development firm,”‘ Fox News reported:
In 2016, when Person was running Harves and emailing with Hunter and Schwerin regarding business deals, he was also running for Congress in South Carolina’s 5th Congressional District. In September of that year, then-Vice President Biden traveled down to South Carolina for a fundraiser for Person. In addition to the visit, Hunter and Schwerin were recruiting their business associates behind the scenes to donate thousands of dollars to the campaign, according to emails reviewed by Fox News Digital. A 2014 Politico profile piece on Person quotes then-Second Lady Jill Biden saying, “Fran has been like a son to Joe and me. For eight years, we traveled the country, shared holidays together … Fran may be leaving the office, but he will always be a part of our family.”
Six:
In 2015, Hunter and Joe Biden met with business associates from Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan at a popular Washington, DC, restaurant. Joe Biden was then vice president. The New York Post reported:
Online photos of the interior of Cafe Milano match the background of the shot that shows the Bidens smiling while flanked by Kazakhstani oligarch Kenes Rakishev and Karim Massimov, a former prime minister of Kazakhstan.
Seven:
In 2015, the day after Joe and Hunter Biden met with the foreign business partners at Cafe Milano, one of the men emailed Hunter his thanks for the “opportunity to meet your father.” The New York Post reported:
The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads.
An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.
Eight:
In 2016, Hunter and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two to Mexico, where Hunter met with a business associate from Mexico City. On the trip, Jeff Cooper, who ran a large litigation firm, SimmonsCooper, invested $1 million in Hunter and James’ now-defunct hedge fund. The New York Post reported:
SimmonsCooper also put up $1 million in investment capital for Hunter and his uncle Jim [James] Biden’s abortive attempt to run a hedge fund in 2009. When the venture ended, the Bidens returned the money.
Cooper joined the VP’s entourage on Air Force Two to Mexico in 2016, when he and Hunter were trying to negotiate an ill-fated petroleum deal with Aleman Magnani.
At 6 p.m. on Feb. 24, 2016, about an hour after “wheels up” from Joint Base Andrews on the five-hour flight to Mexico City, Hunter wrote a plaintive email to Aleman Magnani using Air Force Two’s secure, high-speed satellite communications channel. He blind-copied Cooper.
Nine:
In 2017, Joe Biden penned a college recommendation letter for a child of Hunter’s Chinese business partner, Jonathan Li, with whom Joe Biden had met in China. Hunter’s attorney told the Times that Joe Biden’s son left BHR’s board in 2020.
Ten:
In 2017, Hunter stated in an email that Joe Biden was one of his “new office mates” after he “went into business with the CEFC executive,” according to the Washington Post. Hunter also made a key for Joe Biden to use at the House of Sweden in Georgetown. The Post reported:
On Sept. 21, 2017, Hunter Biden wrote to a building manager requesting new office signage to reflect a new family enterprise and a new business relationship: “The Biden Foundation and Hudson West (CEFC-US),” he wrote in emails to the property manager.
He also requested keys for his new office mates: his father, Joe; his mother, Jill; his uncle James; and the Chinese executive, Gongwen Dong.
As part of the request, he provided what he said was his father’s cellphone number, saying an office representative could use it to contact his new office mates.
Eleven:
In 2017, Tony Bobulinski, one of Hunter’s many business partners, twice met with Joe Biden to discuss a business deal in China. “I directly dealt with the Biden family, including Joe Biden,” Bobulinski stated.
Twelve:
After Bobulinski dined with former Vice President Joe Biden, brother Jim Biden, and Hunter to discuss their deal in China, Bobulinski messaged James, telling him to “thank Joe for his time.”
Between 2009 and 2017, Hunter’s business partner, Eric Schwerin, met with Vice President Joe Biden at the White House 19 times, White House visitor logs obtained by the New York Post revealed. Schwerin was the president of the infamous but now-dissolved investment fund Rosemont Seneca Partners.
Fourteen:
In 2018, two years after Joe and Hunter Biden flew to Mexico to meet with Cooper, Hunter texted Cooper about a deal he had in the works with a business partner named Slim, the New York Post reported. “Spoke to my dad about ‘Slim ask,’” Hunter said to Cooper. “Oh that sounds SO F’ING GOOD,” Cooper responded.
Fifteen:
In 2018, Joe Biden called Hunter and left a voicemail about a business deal with the Chinese energy company CEFC. The voicemail revealed the Biden family’s concern that sensitive information was included in a New York Times article about Hunter’s involvement with CEFC’s chairman Ye Jianming. “Hey pal, it’s Dad. It’s 8:15 on Wednesday night. If you get a chance just give me a call. Nothing urgent. I just wanted to talk to you,” Joe Biden said.
“I thought the article released online, it’s going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good. I think you’re clear. And anyway if you get a chance give me a call, I love you,” the message concluded.
Sixteen:
In 2019, Hunter’s “laptop from hell” revealed the Biden family’s payout vehicle for income derived from the family’s business deals. The mechanism includes a collection of 50 percent of familial salaries for 30 years. Hunter reportedly paid thousands of dollars for Joe Biden’s house repairs from the money reportedly obtained from selling access to Joe Biden.
“I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years,” Hunter described in texts to his daughter. “It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike Pop [Joe], I won’t make you give me half your salary.”
Seventeen:
In 2020, Hunter Biden’s business partner, James Gilliar, who named Joe Biden ‘the big guy’ in a 2017 email, again referred to Joe Biden as “the Big Guy” in a text conversation the day the New York Post began publishing the “Laptop from Hell” series, the Post reported. Gilliar received a “panicked” message from an unnamed person on October 14, 2020, about Joe Biden’s involvement with the family business on the same day the Post began breaking the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” series.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter and Gettr @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
