Last week, when questioned about what he knew of his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings in China, Joe Biden claimed he knew nothing because he had never discussed his son’s business dealings with him.
From Fox:
“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden said, pointing the finger at President Trump. “I know Trump deserves to be investigated. He is violating every basic norm of a president. You should be asking him why is he on the phone with a foreign leader, trying to intimidate a foreign leader. You should be looking at Trump.”
That immediately was called into question because of a prior statement made by Hunter to the New Yorker indicating that he had in fact spoken with his father at least once about business.
But now there are pictures emerging which also call into question Joe Biden’s claim.
On Tucker Carlson’s show last night, he revealed pictures from August 2014, when Hunter was still on the board of the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. The pictures showed Joe Biden with Hunter and his business partner on Burisma at the time, Devon Archer.
Tucker Carlson revealed this pic tonight from 2014 that shows Biden playing golf w/his son and his son's business partner, Devon Archer, who were both on the board of the Ukrainian gas company at the time
Biden said earlier this month that he *never* discussed business w/his son pic.twitter.com/vdeoMNpXpK
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) October 1, 2019
News reports show that Joe Biden was in the Hamptons at the time of the picture, according to Fox.
Hunter Biden was receiving $50,000 a month from Burisma to be on their board despite having no prior experience in Ukraine or the energy business.
Biden later admitted on camera that he had pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor Viktor Shokin by threatening to withhold $1 billion in aid while he was Vice President. Shokin was fired. Shokin later claimed in an affidavit to an Austrian court this year that he was investigating Hunter Biden’s firm, Burisma, and that was at least in part why he was fired. This affidavit was revealed by John Solomon at The Hill.
But the golfing picture wasn’t the only time there were pictures where there seemed an intersection of Hunter’s business life and Joe Biden, as is noted in this Twitchy post.
Rudy Giuliani wants Joe Biden to ‘release records to see if he flew Hunter to China in Dec. 2013…’; But we don’t need records. Here’s a photo of them landing in Beijing https://t.co/XvkJW0zqVp
— Kimberly Guilfoyle (@kimguilfoyle) September 25, 2019
Twitchy observes:
Here’s the caption for the photo. Note the update in 2014 to cover Hunter’s new work in Ukraine:
FILE – This Dec. 4, 2013, file photo shows U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, left, arriving on Air Force Two in Beijing, China, with his son Hunter Biden, right, and his granddaughter Finnegan Biden. As the Vice President travels to Ukraine Saturday, June 7, 2014, his youngest son, Hunter, 44, has been hired by a private Ukrainian company that promotes energy independence from Russia, but is commercially active in the breakaway Russian-backed state of Crimea and owned by a former government minister with ties to Ukraine’s ousted pro-Russian president. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, Pool)
As the New Yorker noted, Hunter had just made a deal to create a private equity fund, despite the fact that his father the Vice President was a point man on China for the Obama administration.
In June, 2013, Li, Archer, and other business partners signed a memorandum of understanding to create the fund, which they named BHR Partners, and, in November, they signed contracts related to the deal. Hunter became an unpaid member of BHR’s board but did not take an equity stake in BHR Partners until after his father left the White House.
According to Peter Schweizer, the $1 billion private equity deal was:
“[w]ith a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China. The deal was later expanded to $1.5 billion. In short, the Chinese government funded a business that it co-owned along with the son of a sitting vice president.”
While there, both Bidens met with President Li.
According to the New Yorker, Joe Biden staff was concerned about the appearance of impropriety but were too “intimidated” to bring it up with the Vice President.
When I asked members of Biden’s staff whether they discussed their concerns with the Vice-President, several of them said that they had been too intimidated to do so. “Everyone who works for him has been screamed at,” a former adviser told me. Others said that they were wary of hurting his feelings. One business associate told me that Biden, during difficult conversations about his family, “got deeply melancholy, which, to me, is more painful than if someone yelled and screamed at me. It’s like you’ve hurt him terribly. That was always my fear, that I would be really touching a very fragile part of him.”
Obviously, there are legitimate questions here that can’t be papered over by just screaming, “Trump.”
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