‘Salacious’ Hunter Biden Stories Are Media ‘Smokescreen’ For Corruption - ‘Laptop From Hell’ Author
22:06 GMT 06.12.2021 (Updated: 22:11 GMT 06.12.2021)
© AP Photo / Charles Dharapak
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Stories about US President Joe Biden’s son, businessman Hunter Biden, have swirled for years, but the most important ones aren’t the headline-grabbing playboy scandals, one journalist tells Sputnik: they’re the ones exposing a deep-seeded corruption based in exploiting his father’s political office.
The hubbub about Hunter Biden first made US headlines in 2019 after then-US President Donald Trump pressured the new Ukrainian government of President Volodymyr Zelensky to reopen a probe into Burisma Holdings, a company doing business in the country’s gas sector on whose board Hunter sat, that closed in 2015. Joe Biden, who was US vice president at the time, boasted as recently as 2018 that he had forced then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire the state prosecutor heading the Burisma probe.
However, while Trump’s efforts provoked an impeachment by the Democrat-controlled House of which he was eventually acquitted, comparatively little interest has been paid in the time since to the allegations against Hunter or Joe Biden, with the corporate media eventually deciding to label them a “far-right conspiracy theory.”
Miranda Devine, New York Post journalist and author of the book “Laptop From Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide,” told Radio Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Monday that the salacious Hunter Biden stories are “almost like a smokescreen” concealing the corruption and dirty dealing that she says implicates both Hunter and the US president.
“It’s nine years’ worth of material, so thousands of emails, photos, text messages, voice memos, documents - you know, everything. We all have our lives in the cloud, in our laptop, and that’s what we found with Hunter Biden,” she noted about the laptop, which was inadvertently left with a Delaware repair shop by him and never retrieved.
“In terms of implicating Joe Biden, the Biden family - that his son and mainly one of his brothers, Jim Biden - were running this influence-peddling scheme around the world using his name and there’s ample evidence on the laptop that he’s aware of what they were doing, in fact instrumental in a lot of what they were doing, and some evidence that he was financially benefiting from it,” Devine told hosts Jamarl Thomas and Shane Stranahan.
“I think the salacious part is almost like a smokescreen: it actually has prevented a lot of people from seeing through to what’s really important on the laptop. Because Hunter Biden, a 51-year-old debauched little rich kid who had a raging crack addiction which he apparently has kicked - and good on him - but that’s sort of irrelevant. What is important is that he is the son of the president and that he made this money and was trading on his father’s name during the period that Joe Biden was vice president - and Joe Biden assisted him.”
“A lot of it was out in the open, that’s what’s so extraordinary about it. It was really quite shameless,” the author told Sputnik. Giving one example, she noted that Hunter traveled with his father to Beijing on a December 2013 trip intended to defuse tensions between China and surrounding nations over disputed island claims off the East Asian coast.
“When Hunter Biden got off the plane with his father, that was a signal to the Chinese that this was American Power come to do private business - and sure enough, that’s what happened,” Devine said. “Joe Biden went into a private room, shook hands with Hunter Biden’s new Chinese business partner, and the vice president walked away from that three-day meeting with President Xi Jinping and high-level CCP (Communist Party of China) officials empty-handed on behalf of America; but Hunter walked out with a 10% stake in an investment firm which by 2019, according to the laptop documents, had $2.5 billion worth of funds under management.”
The company was Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) Equity Investment Fund Management Company, of which Hunter claimed in 2019 to have stepped down from the board so as not to complicate his father’s run for the presidency. However, a report by the Washington Examiner in June found that he still had not divested from the firm.
More recently, the New York Times reported last month that during his time on the board, BHR had helped the Chinese state-owned enterprise China Molybdenum acquire access to a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The metal is necessary for producing electric car batteries. However, a spokesperson for the SOE told the paper they didn’t know Hunter and had no knowledge of his work with BHR.
Devine added there are “so many examples on the laptop” like the BHR deal, in which Joe Biden met with Hunter’s business partners across the globe during his eight-year time as vice president of the United States.
“During the campaign, Joe Biden told reporters repeatedly ‘I know nothing about my son Hunter’s overseas business dealings.’ That was a lie proven on the laptop,” Devine said.
The journalist predicted that if the Republicans triumph in the Congressional midterm elections next year, they will hold hearings about the “ample evidence” and “follow the money.”
Devine noted that the laptop was “just one part of the jigsaw puzzle,” which also includes former associates like Tony Bobulinski, who first spoke out in the final days before the 2020 US presidential election in which Joe Biden eventually triumphed. She said documents Bobulinski supplied her played a “crucial part” of her book, including the contents of three phones handed over to the FBI and to a Senate probe.
The third part of the puzzle, she said, is the inquiry by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Hunter Biden’s conflicts of interest that was published on September 23, 2020.
“What they had access to was Treasury Department documents, which was something called a Suspicious Activity Report - dozens of them that were sent by banks to the Treasury Department under law when money comes into a United States bank account from ‘suspect sources,’” she said, explaining that could include nations under US sanction or “any other sort of shady kind of oligarch around the world.”
She also described some 26,000 emails given to journalists by another business partner of Hunter’s, Bevan Cooney, as “a little bit of cream on top.”
