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SMOKING GUNS: Joe Biden referred business and mingled finances with son Hunter, messages show


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The “big guy” was more involved with Hunter’s business dealings than previously admitted; Joe Biden was frequently found hobnobbing with his son’s foreign partners while Hunter paid some of his dad’s bills.

President Joe Biden was more involved in Hunter Biden’s financial and business dealings than previously acknowledged, allowing his son to pay some of his bills, redirecting one of his tax refunds to pay back money he owed to his son, dining with his foreign clients and even directly referring a potential partner to his son’s business, according to email and text messages obtained by the FBI and Congress.

Jeff Cooper “asked for you,” Joe Biden wrote in one particularly telling text message to his son, sending his scion Cooper’s phone number. Cooper is longtime Joe Biden donor and trial lawyer who worked with Beau Biden’s firm in Delaware on asbestos litigation dating back to 2005. From 2012 to 2014, Hunter Biden was listed as a manager of Cooper’s Eudora Global, LLC. Cooper “wants to do some work with you,” Joe Biden wrote and signed off, “Love Dad.”

The message is one of the clearest pieces of evidence gathered by investigators that Joe Biden was not simply a passive bystander in his son’s globe-trotting business pursuits, but rather at times assisting and benefitting financially from his son, the messages show.

For instance, a string of spring and summer 2010 emails show Hunter Biden and a partner at his Rosemont Seneca firm assisted the White House with documents for Joe Biden’s tax returns after his first year in office and then chose to redirect the vice president’s Delaware state tax refund to Hunter Biden to pay off money the father owed his son, the emails state.

“I am depositing it in his account and writing a check in that amount back to you since he owes it to you. Don’t think I need to run it by him, but if you want to go ahead,” Rosemont Seneca official Eric Schwerin wrote in June 2010.

Another Schwerin email a month later entitled “JRB bills”—using the future president’s initials—listed a series of expenses from Joe Biden’s lakefront home in Wilmington, Del., that Hunter Biden had paid.

They included $1,239 of air conditioner repairs at “mom-mom’s cottage,” and another $1,475 to paint the “back wall and columns at the lake house.” There was $475 “for shutters” and $2,600 for building or repairing a “stone retaining wall at the lake.”

Other emails suggested Joe Biden—often referred to as “Pop,” the “big guy,” and “my chairman” in sensitive communications—was looking to Hunter Biden and Schwerin to find him riches for when he left office.

Since Peter Schweizer’s blockbuster 2018 book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, there have been hints that Hunter Biden was providing a cut of his business to his father in the White House and afterwards. There’s that infamous 2017 email that suggested 10% of a major Chinese deal was being reserved by Hunter for the “big guy” and a wandering text message Hunter Biden sent his daughter Naomi complaining that “unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.

But Just the News and the Government Accountability Institute found several references suggesting commingled finances and business matters after reviewing more than 100,000 emails, text messages, bank records and memos obtained under FOIA, by the FBI in other court cases, voluntarily shared by two of Hunter Biden’s estranged business partners or on a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned in 2019 at a repair shop.

Shortly after Joe Biden had been sworn in a vice president in 2009, Hunter Biden joined forces with two of his close friends from Yale: Devon Archer and Christopher Heinz (stepson of then-Senator John Kerry).

Heinz and Archer effectively merged the Heinz business, Rosemont Capital (named after the Heinz family’s Rosemont Farm in Pennsylvania), with Hunter Biden’s Seneca Global Advisors (registered in August 2008 by longtime Biden associate Eric Schwerin and named, like other Biden businesses, after one of the finger lakes in upstate New York).

Rosemont Capital formed the “trunk” of the Biden-Archer-Heinz business tree. Soon there were Rosemont Seneca branches springing out globally in every direction: Rosemont Realty, Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, Rosemont Seneca Bohai, and Rosemont Seneca Thornton, to name a few.

With these entities in place, Joe Biden’s brother and son were able to cash-in on the vice president’s foreign policies—primarily by brokering access and favors for foreign interests in regions where the elder Biden held substantial sway.

Joe Biden’s brother James, for example, landed a billion-dollar construction contract in Iraq while the vice president oversaw the U.S. military occupation there. Hunter Biden (along with Devon Archer) scored “millions of dollars” from the corrupt Ukrainian oil and gas company, Burisma, coinciding with Joe Biden’s “point man” appointment in the region.

Neither Hunter Biden nor James Biden had any experience in Ukrainian energy nor Iraqi construction, respectively. So why were they hired?

THE MEETINGS

Joe Biden has claimed he never discussed his son’s business dealings, insinuating that he never met with his son’s business partners. That appears to be untrue as messages and documents indicate that not only was Joe Biden referring potential clients like Jeff Cooper to Hunter Biden, but he met with his son’s business partners on numerous occasions.

In a 2011 email, Hunter Biden’s business partners discussed cultivating relationships with a wealthy group of Chinese entrepreneurs that one associate described as “China Inc.” as part of a “new push on soft diplomacy for the Chinese.” The “China Inc.” entrepreneurs were desperate to get a meeting at the White House.

It appears Devon Archer or Hunter Biden was able to deliver and thirty members of the Chinese Entrepreneurs Club (CEC) indeed visited the White House on November 14, 2011, according to White House visitor logs. But those logs fail to disclose precisely with whom the Chinese entrepreneurs met with: Vice President Joe Biden himself.

A trip itinerary posted by the CEC indicates the delegation met with Obama’s then-recently-confirmed Commerce Secretary John Bryson but, like the visitor log, makes no mention of a meeting with vice president. But Vice President Joe Biden did meet with his son’s associates. The secret meeting was revealed in an obscure document by one of the founders of the CEC.

In December 2013, Hunter Biden flew to Beijing with his father aboard Air Force Two for the latter’s official visit with Chinese Communist Party leaders. While the vice president was there on official business, the second son was there to line up a billion-dollar private equity deal with the Chinese. Hunter Biden admits that Joe Biden met with his Chinese business partner, Jonathan Li, in the lobby of a Chinese hotel.

In April 2014, Hunter Biden’s closest business partner, Devon Archer, met with Joe Biden in the White House. It is not clear what they discussed but the meeting did take place according to the Obama administration’s Secret Service WAVES visitor logs. Shockingly, the meeting took place on the exact same day that Burisma wired the first payment (totaling over $100,000) to the Rosemont Seneca Bohai account which served as a clearing house for much of Hunter Biden’s and Archer’s foreign income.

In Spring 2015, Hunter Biden invited a bevy of foreign oligarchs including the former mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov and his billionaire wife, Elena Baturina, to dinner at the Café Milano in Washington D.C. Hunter also invited a Burisma representative named Vadym Pozharskyi, and several Kazakh oligarchs.

The Russians did not attend but the Kazakhs and the Ukrainian did and were able to meet with the Vice President Joe Biden in the secluded “Garden Room.” As with other meetings with Hunter Biden’s foreign business associates, Joe Biden conveniently the Garden Room meeting was not disclosed on Joe Biden’s official schedule.

And in February 2016, Hunter sent an angry email to the grandson of a former Mexican president stating, “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 and then you go completely silent – I don’t hear from you for months.” Hunter Biden was furious that he had “delivered on every single thing” the Mexican oligarch had ever asked without reciprocation.

COMINGLED FINANCES

On March 19, 2010, the Vice President’s Counsel emailed Hunter Biden and Eric Schwerin to “check in” on a number of issues relating to Joe Biden’s taxes. A bullet point entitled “2008 Tax Audit Letter” indicated that a case needed to be made to the IRS that the “VP was not required to pay self-employment tax.”

The email raises and number of questions, including, why would the Vice President’s Counsel be asking Hunter Biden and his business partner for help with Joe Biden’s tax “issues?”

Ten days later, Eric Schwerin emailed the Senate “Disbursing” office seeking to change Joe Biden’s “state of withholding” IRS status. Hunter’s business partner sent these emails from his Rosemont Seneca Partners private email account. A few months later, in June 2010, Schwerin was cashing Joe Biden’s state income tax refund check into Joe Biden’s account and then wrote a check to Hunter Biden for full refund amount, telling the vice president’s son “he owes it to you.”

According to his public tax returns, Joe Biden paid $17,718 in State and Local income taxes in the preceding year (2009); it is unclear how much of that was refunded and deposited into Hunter’s account.

Less than one month after passing along Joe Biden’s tax refund to Hunter Biden, Schwerin worked with Hunter Biden on a plan titled “JRB Future Memo” outlining ways for Joe Biden to make more money once he left the White House.

Schwerin asked Hunter Biden, “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?” “Your Dad just called me (about his mortgage) and mentioned he’d be out a lot soon and not really back until Labor Day so it dawned on me it might be a good time [to meet with Joe Biden about the memo] (also he could use some news about his future earnings potential!).”

Why was Joe Biden calling Schwerin about his mortgage? And why was Hunter Biden’s business partner and the manager of his LLCs handling Joe Biden’s taxes and preparing memos about “future earnings potential” barely a year and a half into the vice president’s first term?

The emails about Joe Biden’s mortgage, taxes, and future earnings potential are hardly the only evidence that the vice president and his son were commingling finances with his son.

Even before Joe Biden was elected vice president in 2008, Hunter was paying for the then-Senator’s personal cell phone. A 2018 text message conversation between Hunter and his secretary revealed that “My dad has been using most [phone] lines on this [AT&T] account which I’ve through the gracious offerings of Eric [Schwerin] have paid for past 11 years.”

Using conservative estimates based on the costs outlined in Hunter Biden’s emails, covering Joe Biden’s $190-per-month AT&T bill for eleven years amounts to approximately $25,000 in direct financial benefits to a sitting politician. The undisclosed gift total surpasses $30,000 when the home repairs are included.

 

 

When Joe Biden left office in 2017, he had much more financial freedom as he no longer had to disclose his financial interests. The Chinese intelligence-linked company, CEFC China Energy, waited until February 2017—weeks after Joe Biden returned to the private sector (for the first time in decades)—to begin enriching the Biden family for deals struck between 2015 and 2016.

The Bidens’ CEFC dealings resulted in a nearly $6 million windfall (and a three-carat diamond) that went directly into Hunter and James Biden’s pockets. Just as CEFC was beginning to offer the Bidens big money (including ten percent “held by H[unter]” earmarked for the “Big Guy”), Joe Biden was leaving the White House.

Remarkably, in the same month CEFC began enriching the Biden family following Joe Biden’s departure from the White House, Hunter finally decided to stop paying his dad’s cell phone bill because, as one email indicates, “he [Joe Biden] wants to start paying it.”

By 2019, the emails show, the cash flow had reversed with Joe Biden making a commitment to pay off his drug-addicted son’s bills, according to one poignant message.

“Hello VP team,” Hunter Biden’s assistant wrote to two of Joe Biden’s staffers in January of 2019. “I spoke with Hunter today regarding his bills,” Dodge went on and revealed that the former vice president would “cover these bills in the short-term as Hunter transitions in his career.”

The emails, memos, and other documents raise many questions of ethics and legality surrounding the Biden business model in which Hunter Biden apparently brokered access to his father and served as “bag man,” collecting millions of dollars from Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian oligarchs.

But perhaps it really is as simple as this explicit text message:

“I Hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family [for] 30 years,” Hunter Biden texted his daughter in January 2019. “It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike Pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.”

10. 2019_01_17 – Hunters bills