Yet the president still insists he never talked business with Hunter
FILE PHOTO: Joe Biden and his son Hunter attend the Duke Georgetown NCAA college basketball game in Washington, DC, January 30, 2010 © AP / Nick Wass
Despite repeated denials that he ever spoke to his son Hunter about the latter’s overseas business dealings, Fox News reported on Thursday that President Joe Biden met with at least 14 of Hunter’s business associates from the US, Mexico, Ukraine, China and Kazakhstan.
Abandoned in a Delaware computer repair shop some time before the 2020 election and unearthed by the New York Post weeks before the vote, Hunter’s laptop contained presumed evidence of numerous foreign deals in which businessmen offered tens of millions of dollars for introductions to Joe Biden, as well as graphic proof of Hunter’s drug use and dalliances with prostitutes.
“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden insisted in 2019. When last month Britain’s Daily Mail published a 2018 voicemail featuring Biden speaking to Hunter about a deal with Chinese oil firm CEFC, the official line remained the same, with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre saying that “what the president said still stands.”
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Fox News’ latest report casts serious doubt on Biden’s denial. According to the news site, Joe Biden met with Mexican businessmen Miguel Aleman Velasco and Miguel Aleman Magnani in 2014, giving the pair a tour of the White House. A year later, Biden reportedly spoke by video with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and all three Mexicans – whom Hunter was doing business with or in negotiations with at the time – visited them at the vice presidential residence in Washington DC.
In a text message found on the laptop, Hunter told his business partner, Jeff Cooper, that he had spoken to his father about the deal involving Slim.
Joe Biden also reportedly met with former Colombian President Andres Pastrana Arango and Eric Schwerin, another of Hunter’s business partners, in 2012, before dining with Arango and Juan Esteban Orduz, a Colombian businessman, later that same day.
Files from the laptop show that during a single dinner in 2015, Joe Biden met with Hunter’s business associates from Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Russia, including an executive from Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter a reported $50,000 per month from 2014 to 2018 to sit on its board. The following day, the Burisma executive emailed Hunter, thanking him for “giving an opportunity to meet your father.”
The same executive, Vadim Pozharski, had contacted Hunter in 2014 asking for “advice on how you could use your influence” to thwart a government investigation into the company, the New York Post reported in 2020.
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At the time of the dinner, Hunter was working on an oil deal between Burisma and a Chinese energy company in Kazakhstan, the Daily Mail reported.
Among the other contacts who met with Joe Biden there was reportedly Francis Person, a former advisor to the then-vice president who in 2015 lobbied the Biden family on behalf of a Chinese real estate firm. Person was also running for Congress in South Carolina at the time, with Biden senior traveling to the state to fundraise for him.
Tony Bobulinski, the former CEO of a joint venture between Hunter and a Chinese energy company, told Fox in 2020 that Joe Biden spoke to his son about this deal and others.
“I’ve seen Vice President Biden saying he never talked to Hunter about his business,” Bobulinski told Fox that October. “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.”
Some of the information in Fox’ latest report has already been made public by other news outlets, while some is new. Republican lawmakers have obtained the contents of the laptop and promised to launch investigations should they retake Congress this November. Hunter is also being probed by federal prosecutors for alleged tax and foreign lobbying violations. He has not been charged with a crime.
