Hunter Biden would most probably have been indicted before the November 2020 presidential election if he wasn’t the son of then-Democratic hopeful and now POTUS Joe Biden, believes a former high-ranking federal prosecutor.
“Anybody else in this country, we would have seen these indictments probably before the election,” said ex-Utah US Attorney Brett Tolman, speaking on “Fox & Friends” on Friday.
Referencing a recent NBC report that stated a probe into the first son’s shady overseas business dealings was far from over, Tolman added that “the US attorney in Delaware … has had this case for a long time.”
Tolman, who is currently executive director of Right on Crime, a project of the nonprofit Texas Public Policy Foundation, cited testimony provided in line with the probe by former Hunter Biden business partner, Tony Bobulinksi, as well as reports of a spate of incriminating emails.
According to him, all of this raised the possibility that President Joe Biden, his wife - First Lady Jill Biden – his brother James Biden and others “facilitated their ability to take money from countries.”
“Large amounts, millions of dollars we're talking about and to be able to hide that from the government and to hide what they were buying with that money … we're afraid to see, maybe access that was given to the vice president at the time?” said Tolman.
The former federal prosecutor said that if it were up to him, he would be issuing, months ago, “search warrants… [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] FISA warrants to uncover what was happening with China.”
“I would have put together a team of people. I know that there are US attorneys that are well-meaning,” added Tolman.
GOP Urge Hunter Biden Probe
Hunter Biden’s overseas work has been the subject of a federal investigation as part of an inquiry into his taxes. In March, witnesses were called before a grand jury as federal prosecutors seek to establish whether the President’s son failed to account for income from China-related deals, according to The Post.
NBC News reported on 1 April that what had started as an investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes has since expanded, with prosecutors looking into allegations he violated federal lobbying laws on behalf of foreign companies.
A growing number of witnesses have been called before a grand jury, according to insiders cited by the outlet, with the investigation run by a US attorney in Delaware, David Weiss, appointed by former President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, a growing chorus of Republicans have underscored that for years, concerns over Hunter Biden’s dubious foreign business dealings and the possibility he had peddled access to his father, then vice president and currently POTUS, have been “inexcusably ignored by Congressional Democrats.”
Members of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), along with 13 other Republicans, recently signed letters demanding records of all communication between Hunter Biden and the White House during the two terms of the Barack Obama administration when his father was vice president, reported New York Post.
They had voiced concern that Hunter Biden might “continue to profit” from his position, now as the son of the US President.
The GOP has also vowed that if Republicans win back a majority in the House and Senate in the November midterm elections, Hunter Biden would be summoned before a hearing to answer questions about his shady business dealings.
This comes as The New York Times recently confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop after dismissing the original article in the New York Post (NYP) almost a year and a half ago as "Russian disinformation".
NYP reported in 2020 that a Mac belonging to Hunter Biden, left at a repair shop in Delaware in 2019, contained emails questioning claims by Joe Biden that he never used his former position as vice president to aid his son in the latter's foreign business dealings.
A series of exposes in The Post in October 2020 also claimed that as part of Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and China, he was paid up to $50,000 a month to sit on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, Furthermore, Hunter Biden purportedly introduced his father, the then-vice president, to a top executive at the firm.
The NYT dismissed the Post story as “unsubstantiated”, while former intelligence officials, such as ex-National Intelligence Director James Clapper, slammed the information on the laptop as bearing traces of a Russian “disinformation campaign.”
However, in its 16 March report about the ongoing federal probe into Hunter Biden's tax bills, the NYT revealed that certain emails, scrutinised by prosecutors, had been taken from "a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop". It added they had been “authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation".
After that, the Washington Post became the second major news organization to perform an about-face, admiting that emails from what Donald trump had dubbed ta the time “the laptop from Hell” were real.
Then Vice President Joe Biden, left, and his son Hunter Biden appear at the Duke Georgetown NCAA college basketball game in Washington on Jan. 30, 2010.
© AP Photo / Nick Wass
As to Joe Biden’s assurances that he has never spoken “to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Republicans have been highly skeptical about those statements, even though the White House recently stood by the president's past assertion that "nothing unethical" had occurred.