First son Hunter Biden joined his father for the Fourth of July Monday as a federal criminal investigation continues into possible tax fraud, money laundering and foreign lobbying crimes linked to his overseas business deals.
The younger Biden, 52, joined his father aboard Marine One as the presidential helicopter returned to DC from Camp David in Maryland. He previously was seen in mid-April at the White House Easter Egg Roll with his young son Beau.
The White House doesn’t release visitor logs from the president’s Delaware residences, where he routinely spends weekends, or Camp David — making it hard to know how often Hunter Biden and his business associates see his father.
The US attorney’s office in Delaware is investigating Hunter Biden’s finances. In recognition of the fact that he failed to pay taxes, the first son recently cut the IRS a check for about $2 million, according to reports. The funds reportedly were provided by Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, but it’s unclear what strings are attached.
The first son’s overseas dealings gained significant attention this year when the Washington Post and New York Times in March belatedly verified documents from a former Hunter Biden laptop that were first reported by The Post in October 2020.
House and Senate Republicans, meanwhile, say they plan to launch investigations into President Biden’s possible involvement in his son’s business endeavors if they retake Congress in November’s midterm elections.
The White House this year said President Biden is sticking to his 2019 claim that he had “never spoken” with Hunter Biden about “his overseas business dealings” — despite mounting evidence to the contrary, including a recently published 2018 voicemail in which Joe Biden mentioned a New York Times article about his son’s Chinese business partner.
Emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop also indicate that Joe Biden, while still vice president, attended a 2015 DC dinner with a group of his son’s associates from Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan.
A photo depicts Joe Biden posing with the Kazakhstani group at the dinner. One day after the gathering, Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at Ukrainian gas company Burisma, emailed the then-second son to thank him for the opportunity to meet his father. Hunter Biden earned a reported $1 million per year to serve on Burisma’s board while his dad led the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.
The guest list also included Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, ex-Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, according to an email. A report drafted by Republican-led Senate committees in 2020 said that Baturina in 2014 paid $3.5 million to a firm linked to Hunter Biden.
Baturina has not yet faced US sanctions in response to the more than four-month-old Russian invasion of Ukraine, despite Biden sanctioning many other members of Russia’s elite.
Joe Biden also allegedly was linked to his son’s dealings with CEFC China Energy, which the Washington Post reported paid Hunter Biden and first brother Jim Biden $4.8 million in 2017 and 2018.
Former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski says that he spoke with Joe Biden in May 2017 about the Chinese venture. A May 13, 2017, email indicated that the “big guy” would get a 10 percent equity stake in a corporate entity established with CEFC.
Bobulinski alleges that the president was the “big guy” and emails show that in September 2017, Hunter Biden asked for a new sign and more keys to an office he was renting in DC’s House of Sweden office building. The sign was to say, “The Biden Foundation and Hudson West (CEFC-US)” and the keys were for his father, Jill and Jim Biden, and a Chinese executive named Gongwen Dong. A spokeswoman for the agency that oversees the property said, however, that the sign was never changed and the keys were not picked up.
Also in China, Hunter Biden cofounded an investment firm called BHR Partners in 2013 less than two weeks after flying with his father to Beijing aboard Air Force Two.
Hunter introduced Joe Biden to BHR CEO Jonathan Li in the lobby of a hotel in China’s capital. The fund is controlled in part by state-owned entities and facilitated the 2016 sale for $3.8 billion of a Congolese cobalt from a US company to the firm China Molybdenum. Cobalt is a key component in electric car batteries.
Hunter Biden’s attorney Chris Clark said less than a week after President Biden’s November summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping that the first son had divested a 10% stake in BHR Partners. Hunter Biden and the White House provided no further details on who may have acquired his stake and for how much money.
Photos and emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop further indicate that Joe Biden in 2015 hosted his son and a group of Mexican business associates at the vice president’s official residence. The elder Biden posed for a photo with Hunter and a group that included Mexican billionaires Carlos Slim and Miguel Alemán Velasco.
In 2016, Hunter Biden apparently emailed one of his Mexican associates while aboard Air Force Two for an official visit to Mexico, complaining that he hadn’t received reciprocal business favors after “I have brought every single person you have ever asked me to bring to the F’ing White House and the Vice President’s house and the inauguration.”
Hunter Biden’s business partner Eric Schwerin visited the White House and vice president’s residence at least 19 times while Joe Biden was vice president, visitor logs show, casting further doubt on Joe Biden’s claims to have been unaware of his son’s business ventures.
At his 2020 impeachment trial, President Donald Trump’s defense team cited visitor logs that showed Biden met with his son’s partner Devon Archer on April 16, 2014, around the time Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, which was founded by corrupt pro-Russia oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky. Trump attorney Pam Bondi argued that Trump was right to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens because Joe Biden may have been involved in the Burisma arrangement. Archer joined Burisma the same month, weeks before Biden’s son.
Since his father became president, Hunter Biden has launched an art career seeking as much as $500,000 for his novice works.
The White House developed a plan for those sales to theoretically be anonymous to prevent possible influence-peddling, but ethics experts say that the arrangement actually creates greater corruption concerns. Hunter received at least $375,000 last year for five prints at a Hollywood art show attended by one of his father’s ambassador nominees, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. It’s unclear how many additional sales he may have made.
