Developments concerning the president's son include the mysterious laptop and a federal tax investigation
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Scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s businesses has been renewed in the mainstream press, evidenced most emphatically by a New York Times story published last week that was based, in part, on documents the publication says appear to have been taken from Hunter Biden’s personal laptop.
The story revealed that President Joe Biden’s son recently paid off “a significant tax liability,” a year after he disclosed the existence of a federal investigation into his taxes.
He reportedly told an associate he had to take out a loan to make the payment of more than $1 million, according to the story. It did not disclose who lent the money to the president’s son.
The story further described that a grand jury in Wilmington is gathering evidence as part of a wide-ranging federal examination of Hunter Biden’s businesses, and said federal prosecutors over the last two years “have issued scores of subpoenas for documents related to Hunter Biden’s foreign work and for bank accounts linked to him and his associates.”
Those associates include Devon Archer, who founded the investment firm Rosemont Seneca along with Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz, stepson of John Kerry, the former senator and secretary of state.
Hunter Biden and Archer also previously worked together as board members for the Ukrainian gas giant, Burisma Holdings.
While the Times story heightened the national focus on Hunter Biden, the existence of the grand jury first was revealed in February by the British tabloid the Daily Mail in a piece that described how the mother of Hunter Biden’s 3-year-old daughter had testified as part of the proceedings in Delaware.
The Daily Mail story followed yet another piece published in late January by Politico about a New York Times open records lawsuit filed that month, arguing for the State Department to turn over emails sent by U.S. embassy officials in Romania that mention Hunter Biden and his former partner, Tony Bobulinski, among others.
In the leadup to the 2020 presidential election, Bobulinski went public with claims he had evidence of Joe Biden knowing about his son’s businesses abroad and benefiting financially from them. The president has denied the claims.
Also pending with the State Department is an open records request filed by another news organization seeking emails sent in April 2013 by staff at the embassy in Mexico City that mention the younger Biden.
Hunter Biden took a trip to the Mexican capital that month where he met with business leaders and with then-U.S. ambassador Anthony Wayne, according to local news reports.
Following the Daily Mail article, a flurry of new reports mentioning Hunter Biden appeared after his business partner, Archer, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison. The conviction, which had previously been thrown out by a lower court federal judge, was for Archer’s role in a scheme to fraudulently sell $60 million in bonds in 2014 and 2015 on behalf of a Native American economic development entity in South Dakota.
Instead of economic development, prosecutors say $43 million of the proceeds from the bond sales were used to acquire companies that were to be “rolled up” into a large financial institution. According to court documents, the new conglomerate would have Archer as chairman and Hunter Biden as a vice chairman.
The CEO was to be Jason Sugarman, a California businessman and advisor to the Banc of California where his brother served as CEO.
Others charged in the case include Jason Galanis and his father John Galanis, each of whom possesses a long history of involvement in white-collar crime. Court documents indicate the Galanis’ and other defendants used the Biden name to sell the fraudulent bonds to unsuspecting investors.
A lawyer for Hunter Biden did not respond to a request to comment.
Sugarman was not criminally charged in the case, but the SEC has named him as a defendant in a civil lawsuit for his alleged role in the scheme.
Biden camp says meeting 'never took place'
The recent Hunter Biden news comes more than a year after the New York Post published a story stating Joe Biden had met with an executive at Burisma Holdings in 2015, despite his previous statements denying he had ever met with his son’s business associates.
The story hinged on an email sent from the apparent account of the executive, Vadym Pozharskyi, to Hunter Biden thanking him for the “opportunity” to meet then-Vice President Biden and spend “some time together.”
Another email published in the story showed Pozharskyi asking Hunter Biden for advice on how he could use his “influence to convey a message/signal, etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions.” At the time the message was sent, May 2014, then-Vice President Biden served as President Obama’s point person on Ukraine.
Hours after the story’s publication, Biden’s presidential campaign categorically stated, “No meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
Still, the emails were among thousands of documents found on a hard drive from a laptop the Post said had been left in April 2019 at a Wilmington computer repair store, called the Mac Shop, by a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden.
The story described how the shop owner, later identified as John Paul Mac Isaac, made a copy of the hard drive before turning it over to the FBI in December 2019.
By September the following year, he gave it to Robert Costello, an attorney for former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Guiliani’s team subsequently provided it to the New York Post.
While the Post story was damning, its credibility was questioned as it was unclear at the time whether it truly was Hunter Biden who abandoned the laptop. For months, Giuliani had been looking for dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine and elsewhere, Days after the Post story ran, Time Magazine and Politico each published pieces citing sources who claimed emails and photos purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden had been circulating in Ukraine.
In November, Mac Isaac’s attorney Brian Della Rocca said his office was investigating whether computer files Giuliani had publicly claimed to have taken from the hard drive existed on the device when it was handed over by his client the previous September.
In April 2020, Hunter Biden told CBS he did not remember leaving a laptop at Mac Isaac's shop.
"But whether or not somebody has my laptop, whether or not ... it was hacked, whether or not there exists a laptop at all, I truly don't know," Hunter Biden said in the interview.
