White House Logs 'Show Joe Biden Met With Hunter's Business Partner in 2010'
10:10 GMT 24.04.2022 (Updated: 11:16 GMT 24.04.2022)
© AP Photo / Nick Wass
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President Joe Biden has always vehemently dismissed all claims of his involvement in the foreign business affairs of his son, Hunter Biden. Earlier in April White House Press Secretary Jenn Psaki, when asked to confirm if Biden's statement on the issue still stands, replied, “Yes”.
Joe Biden, during his tenure as vice president, met with Eric Schwerin, his son Hunter Biden’s leading investment partner, show the White House’s archived visitor logs, cited by the New York Post.
One of at least 19 such visits by Schwerin to the WH between 2009 and 2015 during the tenure of then-President Barack Obama, the official sit-down took place on 17 November 2010 in the West Wing, the outlet writes.
This report yet again casts doubt on the current president’s claims that he knew nothing of the business dealings of his son, who currently faces federal prosecution for alleged tax fraud, money laundering and illegal foreign lobbying.
2 April 2022, 00:54 GMT
Furthermore, the logs appear to suggest that Schwerin, then president of the since-dissolved investment fund Rosemont Seneca Partners, met with a succession of close aides of both Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, while their son Hunter was concluding multi-million dollar deals abroad, including in China.
Thus, Schwerin had meetings with Joe Biden’s aide Evan Ryan and assistant Michele Smith as well as Jill Biden’s special assistant Meg Campbell and aide Betsy Massey, among others.
Private equity firm Rosemont Seneca Partners was founded in 2009 by Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz, the stepson of former US Secretary of State John Kerry, and Heinz’s college roommate and fellow financier Devon Archer.
Biden and Heinz were company co-owners, while Archer was a “managing partner”, a report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission states.
Rosemont Seneca has been at the centre of multiple investigations pertaining to Hunter Biden’s offshore financial practices, as mounting evidence reveals how he leveraged his father’s connections and state position in negotiations.
Eric Schwerin, president of the firm, is linked to a variety of the younger Biden's foreign business dealings, both past and present.
Thus, emails from Hunter Biden's now notorious laptop, discarded at a Delaware computer repair store in April 2019, shed light on a series of exchanges between him and his associates in Rosemont Seneca’s joint venture with Chinese investment firms Bohai Capital and Bohai Harvest RST (BHR).
11 April 2022, 12:26 GMT
According to hard drive emails from the laptop, once aptly dubbed by Donald Trump as “the laptop from Hell”, Eric Schwerin was involved in Joe Biden’s personal taxes and discussed the then-vice president’s financial affairs with him.
Logs show that in October 2009, Schwerin met with Evan Ryan, Joe Biden’s assistant for intergovernmental affairs and public liaison, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
An email dated 18 February 2010 reveals a request received by Ryan from Chris Sloan, director of government relations for the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. Sloan, who advocated that union lawyer Craig Becker be nominated to the National Labor Relations Board, asked that Joe Biden press then-POTUS Barack Obama on the issue.
“Thanks Chris — I will forward this one”, Ryan, who has since married Antony Blinken, current secretary of state, is shown as responding.
A month later Obama named Becker for the job.
Emails show the Eric Schwerin handled Joe Biden’s “Delaware tax refund check”. In a 6 July 2010 email, titled “JRB Future Memo”, Schwerin wrote to Hunter Biden, saying:
“Your Dad just called me (about his mortgage) and mentioned he’d be out a lot soon and not really back until Labor Day … He could use some positive news about his future earnings potential”.
Cited White House logs show that Schwerin’s stopovers often appeared to coincide with keynote visits or negotiations made by Joe Biden.
Thus, in August 2011, then-Vice President Joe Biden arrived in China for three days of high level meetings with top leaders, including future Chinese President Xi Jinping. Several days later, on 22 August, Eric Schwerin is shown by visitor logs to have had a meeting in the West Wing with Kellen Suber, an executive assistant to Joe Biden.
In 2013, when Hunter Biden together with Chinese businessman Jonathan Li agreed in June to set up the BHR Partners firm, Eric Schwerin put in some additional WH appearances in March and May, meeting with Joe Biden's assistant Kathy Chung and his Director of Administration Faisal Amin.
An earlier report also revealed that in February 2017, Schwerin emailed the CEO of BHR, Jonathan Li after the latter had sent Hunter Biden his son's resume with a list of colleges he planned to apply to.
"Jonathan, Hunter asked me to send you a copy of the recommendation letter that he asked his father to write on behalf of Christopher for Brown University", Schwerin said in the cited email.
There is no additional information on whether Li’s son was admitted to Brown University.
When pressed on the content of the emails, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told Fox News Digital, "We don't comment on the laptop".
Evidence of ‘Pay-to-Play’
The fresh report feeds into the mounting Republican calls to launch an investigation into the Bidens, with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) cited as saying:
“Not everyone gets to meet the Vice President of the United States in the White House. The press should be asking why Hunter Biden’s business associates — like Eric Schwerin — had that privilege and were given access to the Obama White House. This is additional evidence that Joe Biden lied when he said he never discussed Hunter’s foreign business dealings. It’s well past time for the corporate media to demand the truth from Joe Biden. The corruption of Biden Inc. must be exposed”.
The emails cited by the Post were part of a trove of data contained on a laptop that Hunter Biden left behind at a Delaware repair shop in 2019, highlighting his shady overseas business dealings and the possibility he had peddled access to his father, the then-vice president.
The contents of the “laptop from Hell” were originally reported in an article in the New York Post, but dismissed as "Russian disinformation" by mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times.
However, amid the ongoing Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax fraud and money laundering, the NYT finally confirmed last month that the laptop had been “authenticated by people familiar with” the emails in the cache on the computer’s drive.
10 April 2022, 07:16 GMT
The trove of data shed light on links the junior Biden and his father had to a range of unethical and potentially illegal activity. Thus, it was recently revealed by The Washington Post that Hunter Biden and James Biden, the US president's brother, were paid approximately $4.8 million over a span of 14 months by a Chinese-linked consulting group.
Throughout all these revelations, President Joe Biden has repeatedly denied being linked in any way to his son’s business dealings.
In the wake of the ever-emerging fresh evidence, Texas Senator Ted Cruz was cited by the Post as saying the Bidens needed to be investigated for corruption, adding:
“It's increasingly obvious that Hunter Biden's business revolved around providing access to his father and the highest levers of power. It reeks of pay-to-play. The clear solution is a Special Counsel investigation to fairly investigate the disturbing allegations of Biden family corruption”.
