Report: Biden Met with Son Hunter's Foreign Business Associates as VP
It’s the laptop that just keeps on giving.
According to a report published Wednesday by the New York Post, emails found on a laptop apparently abandoned by Hunter Biden show that now-President Joe Biden’s son brought his father to a dinner with Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakhstani business associates in Washington during Biden’s tenure as vice president.
While previous emails found on the laptop had hinted at meetings between some of the shadier associates Hunter Biden picked up during his time on the board of the Ukrainian energy holding company Burisma, the report throws serious doubt on Joe Biden’s claim he had little knowledge of his son’s business dealings in Eastern Europe.
According to the Post, the meeting took place on April 16, 2015, in the so-called “Garden Room” at Cafe Milano, a restaurant described in a 2017 New York Times article as “the Georgetown restaurant where some of the world’s most powerful people go to be noticed but not approached. “
The importance of the date is that it came one day before one of the more controversial emails found on the infamous laptop, where Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi thanked Hunter Biden for an introduction to the then-vice president.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together,” Pozharskyi wrote.
“It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”
“The guest list prepared by Hunter three weeks before the Café Milano dinner included Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, corrupt former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, who since has died. Baturina wired $3.5 million on Feb. 14, 2014, to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, a Delaware-based investment firm co-founded by Hunter and Devon Archer, a former adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry,” the Post reported.
In an email to Archer three weeks before the event, according to the Post, Hunter described the guest list as including associates from the business world, diplomats and representatives of World Food Program:
“3 seats for our KZ [Kazakhstan] friends.
“2 seats for Yelana and husband
“2 [seats for] you and me.
“3 seats for WFPUSA people
“Vadym [Pozharskyi].
“3 Ambassadors (MX, ?, ?)
“Total 14”
In a back-and-forth, the Post reported, Archer told Hunter that Baturina wouldn’t be attending; “Yelena doesn’t want to steal Yuri’s Thunder, so she’ll be in town to meet with us but doesn’t want to come to dinner,” he wrote in a March 20 email. “That was just her thoughts. We could insist.”
“Obviously save a seat for your guy (and mine if he’s in town),” he added.
In a reply, Hunter said, “I think your guy being there is more trouble than it’s worth- unless you have some other idea.”
It’s unclear whether Archer’s “guy” was John Kerry, although we can assume Hunter’s “guy” was his own father. If Archer’s “guy” really was the current climate czar of the United States, I think Kerry might have seen less trouble from this than Hunter’s “guy” did.
Furthermore, while the impetus behind the dinner was supposed to be about food security — hence the World Food Program USA’s presence — Hunter’s language seemed to indicate this was more pretext than purpose.
“Ok – the reason for the dinner is ostensibly to discuss food security,” Hunter wrote in a March 26 email, according to the Post.
“Dad will be there but keep that between us for now. Thanks.”
“Ostensibly” — defined by Merriam-Webster as “to all outward appearances” — isn’t a word often used when discussing what a meeting will actually be about. In fact, one could say its use practically denotes subterfuge. It could be a poor word choice by Hunter. A better explanation is that the word choice was totally appropriate, it was just the event itself that was a poor choice.
The reported dinner is yet another complication to the official Joe Biden line: “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden said in October of 2019, according to a New York Post report from the time.
And yet there are the emails, the golf outing with a Burisma executive in 2014, this dinner and other red flags.
As The Wall Street Journal noted in an Oct. 15 editorial, a Senate report found multiple Obama administration officials knew about Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma and that one official emailed colleagues saying that “the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.”
Even then, none of this would have been an issue had Biden not famously bragged that he got chief Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who once investigated Burisma, fired as a precondition for international aid in 2016 when the then-vice president was the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine.
While Shokin’s efficacy in fighting corruption at Burisma — or anywhere in Ukraine, for that matter — was questionable at best, Biden’s boast made it clear that, if Hunter Biden was serving on the board of a major Ukrainian company, getting involved in the country’s politics was a massive conflict of interest.
So, as he said, he had no idea about any of what his son was doing. That’s a fine excuse — unless, of course, there are emails like this.
As the Post noted, it was unclear who actually attended the dinner. However, the fact that Hunter Biden received an email the next day from one of the invitees thanking him for the opportunity to meet his father strongly suggests the elder Biden was present.
Imagine, if you will, that Donald Trump Jr. had a sinecure like Hunter Biden’s at Burisma. He arranged a dinner with his father, the president, to meet some of his business associates — “ostensibly” to talk about food security. One of those associates emailed him the next day thanking him for the opportunity to be introduced to Don Jr.’s father.
Do you think the media’s reaction would be to shrug it off or ignore it?
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