There seems to be a lot of hash and trash flying around in the corrupt, lying mainstream media. CNN claims that Hunter Biden, far from being part of a corruption scheme is a victim. I didn’t know that you could be white AND a victim, but maybe if you’re in the political class it can happen.
We could go back further, but we’re talking about a corruption scheme with Vice President Joe Biden at its heart. During the summer of 2006, Hunter Biden and his borther, James Biden, purchased the Paradigm Global Advisors a hedge fund of sorts. According to an unnamed executive quoted in Politico in August, James Biden declared to employees on his first day, “Don’t worry about investors. We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” At this time, Joe Biden is months away from becoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second bid for president.
The unnamed executive who spoke to Politico charged that the purchase of the fund was designed to work around campaign-finance laws:
According to the executive, James Biden made it clear that he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.
Both James and Hunter Biden have denied that James had ever made these comments. But the fund was still a great way to work around campaign finance laws because Slow Joe wasn’t an officer in the corporation.
Hunter Biden had been employed as a consultant to the Delaware bank MBNA, with a $100,000-a-year retainer, according to the New York Times. The bank hired him fresh out of law school and in less than two years promoted him to senior vice president. Biden also separately worked as a lobbyist until 2008, founding the firm Oldaker Biden & Belair, where he represented mostly universities and hospitals but also drug companies such as Achaogen Inc. and Pulmatrix Inc., and the music-sharing company Napster and online gambling sites.
Hunter says he has never lobbied his father on any client matter. But the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest allegedly troubled the senator at one point. According to court records in a lawsuit filed by former business partner Joseph Lotito, Joe Biden wanted Hunter Biden to find a different line of work because his presidential campaign would be greatly complicated if he remained the father of a Washington lobbyist.
On January 5, 2007, Joseph Lotito sued James and Hunter Biden, contending that they cut him out of the purchase of Paradigm Global Advisors. Lotito’s suit claims that the firm was paying Hunter Biden an annual salary of $1.2 million. While Biden has worked for MBNA, he had never worked for a hedge fund or investment firm before.
LINK – ‘Consulting Firm Hired by Burisma Leveraged Biden’s Name to Secure Meeting with State Dept.’
January 7, 2007: Joe Biden announced his second bid for the presidency.
January 18, 2007: Hunter Biden stepped down as interim chief executive of Paradigm Global Advisors, but the company announced he would remain in his position as chairman of Paradigm’s advisory board.
February 21, 2007: James and Hunter Biden countersue Lotito, arguing that he lied about his professional credentials and finances. Biden’s chief of staff toldthe Washington Post, “It is apparent that Mr. Lotito is only invoking Senator Biden’s name to garner media attention.”
July 2007: Biden’s presidential campaign paid Hunter Biden’s firm. Oldaker Biden & Belair LLP, $20,256 for legal work for his campaign. By the end of Biden’s bid, his campaign paid Hunter’s law firm $143,000 for “legal services.”
January 3, 2008: After winning less than 1 percent in the Iowa caucus, Joe Biden announced that he would be ending his second bid for the presidency.
July 25, 2008: An outside audit of Paradigm by the firm of Briggs, Bunting & Dougherty found a “failure to reconcile Investment Advisors reimbursement of fund expenses, failure to reconcile and review cash account on a timely basis, and failure to reconcile and review various other accounts on a timely basis.”
August 23, 2008: Barack Obama announced that Joe Biden would be his running mate. The following day, Obama campaign officials “acknowledged that the connection between the Bidens and MBNA, the enormous financial services company then based in their home state of Delaware, was one of the most sensitive issues they examined while vetting the senator for a spot on the ticket.”
August 27, 2008: The Washington Post reported on an unusual loophole in Hunter Biden’s refusal to lobby his father: “Sen. Barack Obama sought more than $3.4 million in congressional earmarks for clients of the lobbyist son of his Democratic running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, records show. Obama succeeded in getting $192,000 for one of the clients, St. Xavier University in suburban Chicago.” The Post reports that other lobbyists at Biden’s firm lobbied his father.
September 6, 2008: In an interview with Tom Brokaw, Joe Biden argued there was nothing inappropriate about the biggest bank in his state hiring his son: “My son graduated from Yale Law School. The starting salary in Wall Street is $140,000 a year if you want to lawyer. Options he had. He came home to work for a bank.”
September 12, 2008: Hunter Biden files paperwork to end his lobbying work for all clients.
September 2008: Hunter Biden founds Seneca Global Advisors, “a boutique consulting firm” that “helps small and mid-sized companies expand into markets in the U.S. and other countries.”
December 2008: James and Hunter Biden and Anthony Lotito reach a settlement and drop their suits.
January 20, 2009: Joe Biden is sworn in as vice president of the United States.
February 2009: Paradigm gets another headache when one of its partners, Texas financier Allen Stanford, is charged by regulators with an $8 billion fraud. However, Paradigm and James and Hunter Biden are not accused of wrongdoing, and Paradigm’s attorney, Marc LoPresti, says they never met or communicated with Stanford.
June 2009: Hunter Biden co-founds his second company in less than a year, Rosemont Seneca Partners, with Christopher Heinz (the stepson of John Kerry and heir to the Heinz fortune) and Devon Archer, who had been friends with Heinz at Yale.
November 12, 2009: Paradigm’s run of bad luck continues when the U.S. Department of Justice determines that the Manhattan skyscraper housing the offices of Paradigm is partially owned by individuals helping the Iranian government evade sanctions. By 2017, federal prosecutors would contend that the building “served as a front for the Iranian government and as a gateway for millions of dollars to be funneled to Iran in clear violation of U.S. sanctions laws.” There is no evidence that the Bidens or Paradigm knew of their landlord’s ties.
2010: After two years of difficulties and the economic recession, James and Hunter Biden begin “unwinding” the Paradigm Fund, filing for voluntary liquidation. The man who sold them the firm, James Park, never collected on an $8 million note, according to The New Republic.
2010–11: Rosemont Seneca takes off like a rocket in its ability to secure meetings with wealthy Chinese investors. From Peter Schweitzer’s Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends:
Less than a year after opening Rosemont Seneca’s doors, Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were in China having secured access at the highest levels. Thornton Group’s account of the meeting on their Chinese-language website is telling: Chinese executives “extended their warm welcome” to the “Thornton Group, with its U.S. partner Rosemont Seneca chairman Hunter Biden (second son of the now Vice President Joe Biden).” The purpose of the meetings was to “explore the possibility of commercial cooperation and opportunity.” Curiously, details about the meeting did not appear on their English-language website.
Also, according to the Thornton Group, the three Americans met with the largest and most powerful government-fund leaders in China — even though Rosemont was both new and small. To put these meetings in perspective, it was as if the son of the Chinese premier held a single meeting with the heads of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and Blackstone. Except, in this case, these were government entities with trillions of dollars of capital to invest. The delegate spent two days meeting with the top executives of China’s sovereign wealth fund, social-security fund, and largest banks. Hunter posed with them for a series of pictures.
Sometime in 2012: Devon Archer and Hunter Biden begin meetings with “Jonathan Li, who ran a Chinese private-equity fund, Bohai Capital, about becoming partners in a new company that would invest Chinese capital,” according to The New Yorker.
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 Biden becomes an unpaid member of BHR’s board but will not take an equity stake in BHR Partners until after his father left the White House.
August 19, 2013: New York Times business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote in his column, “In Washington, the line between lobbying and bribery is not clear-cut. Until 2008, R. Hunter Biden, son of then-Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., lobbied Congress regularly.”
December 4, 2013: Hunter Biden joined his father on Air Force Two on a trip to China, where his father was meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Hunter arranged for Li to shake hands with his father in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel. Afterward, Hunter and Li have what both parties describe as a social meeting.
According to The New Yorker, at this time other Obama-administration officials weren’t comfortable with Hunter Biden’s business ties in China, but they did not confront the vice president about the matter:
Hunter’s meeting with Li and his relationship with BHR attracted little attention at the time, but some of Biden’s advisers were worried that Hunter, by meeting with a business associate during his father’s visit, would expose the Vice-President to criticism. The former senior White House aide told me that Hunter’s behavior invited questions about whether he “was leveraging access for his benefit, which just wasn’t done in that White House. Optics really mattered, and that seemed to be cutting it pretty close, even if nothing nefarious was going on.” 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.
December 2013: “Less than two weeks later, Hunter Biden’s firm inked a $1 billion private equity deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China,” author and investigator Peter Schweizer says. “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.” But The New Yorker quotes a BHR representative who says the deal was signed before the vice president’s trip to China, a business license came through shortly after, and Hunter was not a signatory.
April 2014: Hunter Biden joins the board of Burisma Holdings. Alan Apter, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker who was chairman of Burisma, said at the time, “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals.” Biden’s primary duty is to attend board meetings and energy forums in Europe once or twice a year, and he was paid $50,000 per month.
Apter added, “This is totally based on merit.”
May 13, 2014: At the White House, Press Secretary Jay Carney responds to a question about Hunter Biden’s joining the board and the appearance of a potential conflict of interest:
I would refer you to the vice president’s office. I saw those reports. You know, Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice president or president. But I would refer you to the vice president’s office.
The same day, at a State Department press briefing, AP reporter Matt Lee asks, “Does this building diplomatically have any concerns about potential perceptions of conflict or/cronyism — which is what you’ve often accused the Russians of doing?”
“No, he’s a private citizen,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki replied.
May 14, 2014: The U.K.-based Guardian newspaper blasted Biden’s new position, snarking, “Somebody needs to get involved in Ukraine’s corporate governance, and it might as well be a clutch of rich, well-connected American dudes with weird first names.” Washington Post columnist Adam Taylor wrote:
The appointment of the vice president’s son to a Ukrainian oil board looks nepotistic at best, nefarious at worst. No matter how qualified Biden is, it ties into the idea that U.S. foreign policy is self-interested, and that’s a narrative Vladimir Putin has pushed during Ukraine’s crisis with references to Iraq and Libya.
Sometime in 2015: Chris Heinz ends his relationship with Rosemont Seneca.
December 8, 2015: Writing in the New York Times, James Risen says of the vice president’s trip to Ukraine:
The credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.
December 11, 2015: A New York Times editorial praises Biden’s message to the Ukrainian government notes:
The credibility of Mr. Biden’s message may be undermined by the association of his son with a Ukrainian natural-gas company, Burisma Holdings, which is owned by a former government official suspected of corrupt practices. A spokesman for the son, Hunter Biden, argues that he joined the board of Burisma to strengthen its corporate governance. That may be so. But Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, has been under investigation in Britain and in Ukraine. It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.
December 2016: Hunter Biden and his wife, Kathleen, file for divorce. The divorce becomes official April 14, 2017. Sometime when Biden is “in the middle of the divorce,” he meets the Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming. As CNN described, “at its height, Ye’s company, CEFC China Energy, aligned itself so closely with the Chinese government that it was often hard to distinguish between the two.”
January 20, 2017: Joe Biden’s second term as vice president ends.
May 2017: Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming and Hunter Biden meet privately at a hotel in Miami. Biden says he offered to use his contacts to help “identify investment opportunities for Ye’s company CEFC China Energy, in liquified natural gas projects in the United States.” After the dinner, Ye sends a 2.8-carat diamond to Hunter’s hotel room with a card thanking him for the meeting. During the divorce proceedings, Hunter Biden and his ex-wife Kathleen dispute the value of the diamond; he says it is worth $10,000, she contends it is worth $80,000.
Biden denied that the diamond could be considered a bribe. “What would they be bribing me for? My dad wasn’t in office.” Hunter Biden told The New Yorker he gave the diamond to his associates and doesn’t know what happened to it
Also during the divorce proceedings, Kathleen “requested that Hunter’s access to their joint assets be limited because the couple had a double mortgage and owed more than $300,000 in back taxes.”
Summer 2017: Hunter Biden begins negotiating a deal for Ye’s company CEFC to invest in a liquefied-natural-gas project in Louisiana. Ye tells Biden that he’s worried about federal authorities’ looking into one of his business associates, Patrick Ho. Hunter agrees to represent Ho as his lawyer.
October 2017: After having an unpaid role on the company’s board since 2013, Hunter Biden acquired a financial stake in BHR, a 10 percent equity interest that was worth $430,000 as of July 2019, according to Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires. At least half of the firm’s stake is owned by Chinese entities, according to business records.
November 18, 2017: Patrick Ho is arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport on bribery and money-laundering charges. He makes a phone call to James Biden, Joe Biden’s younger brother, and asked Biden for a lawyer. (Hunter Biden has not practiced criminal law.)
March 2018: Ye Jianming, the former boss of CEFC China Energy who gave Biden the diamond, vanishes from public sight. The Chinese government detained him for questioning, but “no Chinese authority has released any information about him, and he has not been formally charged with any wrongdoing.”
June 28, 2018: Devon Archer, who co-founded Rosemont Seneca Partners with Hunter Biden back in 2009, is convicted of “conspiracy to commit securities fraud and securities fraud” for allegedly defrauding investors in sham Native American tribal bonds. A few months later, the conviction is overturned and a new trial is ordered.
November 2018: U.S. prosecutors allege that a nonprofit funded by Ye Jianming — the man who gave Hunter Biden that large diamond, who is still missing and believed detained by the Chinese government — had used its United Nations status to offer millions in bribes to African leaders.
Hunter would later tell The New Yorker that he doesn’t see Ye as a “shady character at all,” and he characterized the outcome as “bad luck.”
March 25, 2019: Patrick Ho, Biden’s former legal client, was sentenced to three years in prison for international bribery and money-laundering offenses. He was convicted of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar scheme to bribe top officials of Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC China Energy Company Limited.
April 1, 2019: Writing in The Hill, John Solomon quotes Ukrainian former prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, telling him that, before he was dismissed, he was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, and that his plans included “interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”
May 3, 2019: The Intercept reported that Hunter Biden’s investment company in China, known as Bohai Harvest RST, invested in a company called Face++, which develops facial-recognition software. That facial-recognition software is used in an app that “provides [Chinese] law enforcement with easy, daily access to data detailing the religious activity, blood type, and even the amount of electricity used by ethnic minority Muslims living in the western province of Xinjiang.”
May 16, 2019: Yuriy Lutsenko, the current Ukrainian prosecutor general, told Bloomberg News that neither Hunter Biden nor Burisma was now the focus of an investigation. “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws — at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing. A company can pay however much it wants to its board.”
May 20, 2019: The New York Times reports, “A lawyer for Hunter Biden said he did not conduct any business related to the China investment fund on that trip” in December 2013.
July 1, 2019: Hunter Biden told The New Yorker in an interview, “I’ve pretty much always lived paycheck to paycheck. I never considered it struggling, but it has always been a high-wire act.”
July 22, 2019: Hunter Biden issued a new statement to the Washington Post about his time on the Burisma Holdings board: “At no time have I discussed with my father the company’s business or my board service.”
But yeah, by all means, paint President Trump as the one to blame.
In from round two of plowing the 2 feet of global warming/climate change…needed another coffee so taking a breather. Thank God for fossil fuel diesel & 4WD!
Bottom line for me: The entire lot of them are rotten on the inside but "look good" on the exterior (with the exception of Warren, the woman always looks pained). Every single one of those you cite are corrupt grifter's (my new favorite word of the month), and the media has carried the Left's water to allow them to skate, even denying clear and damning facts (as you detail), and in some cases flipping the facts to Trump. "Deranged" come to mind.
With what we have seen over the past three years against the most effective President of our times (for rational thinking people anyway), and this latest failed attempt debacle to sully him, the Dem's will get even more desperate…maybe activate the Plan [pick a letter] operative. I would not put it past them.
A pox on all their houses. God will have the final say, whether they believe in Him or not.
Typical of the Dems in power. Do as I say, NOT as I do. Move on, nothing to see here… sigh…
"High wire act."
Quite.
Thanks for the info, just confirms what I thought about those people.
Thanks for the post.
Paul L. Quandt
That was military-industrial-strength blogging.
That was so heavy hydraulics were needed to,plow through that pile of corruption.
Thank you for the depth of your post.
Interesting read. It appears Hunter is no boy scout after all.
There you have it; nothing to see here. Hunter Biden is clean and pure as the wind driven snow, and Joe Biden is as honest as the day is long.
Any questions?
Awesome synopsis LL!
You lay it all out like a legal case and it is damning. The whole swamp seems to operate on a blink and nod. My hope is President Trump stays alive to complete a second term.
Okay, now this really peeves me off. I mean, I am so naturally guilty that I have failed a lie detector, on my name!!!
And these turd burglars get away with this crap?
I've been advocating for years that white collar crimes need to have a dollar amount equal to blue collar crimes. So when one does millions of dollars of WCC, that should equal a capital blue-collar crime.
Which would allow the people to nuke the Bidens, and all the other wonderful dems who have robbed and raped people's bank accounts in the last 40 years.
GRRRrrrrrrr.
It is damning. And it is known by people in power. Yet nothing is being done with it.
Christ called such people, "whited sepulchres," meaning that they looked bright and shiny on the outside and that they were rotten and corrupt on the inside. We see that with the Congressional donkeys, and the RINO's of our day.
The double standard may be cool inside the DC Beltway, but I think that America doesn't take the same stance.
The steam calliope is playing and the circus is underway. Shifty, the ringmaster is sort of a character you'd expect to find on the pages of a Stephen King novel.
They have few if any redeeming qualities, and unbounded hubris and smug, self satisfaction. Hunter Biden made a million dollars a year and it only allowed him to live "hand-to-mouth". I wonder what would happen if he had to work a real job instead of the usual no-show jobs?
Lots of corruption from just the one politician's kid. Imagine if it was ALL (all the politicians and their schemes) revealed. We'd be hanging them from the lightposts, or Fredd would be beheading them.
No. Not hardly.
That's what Joe tells CNN and CNN relays to the gullible American public.
Not a damned thing.
I didn't mention the bank that had been created in Ukraine for the benefit of laundering funds. I think that the Bidens were involved but the investigation was not undertaken (yet).
Plus 1, NFO.
Well, Hunter is a demonrat. Therefore you can be white and a victim.
Hunter is a poster child for "It's not what you know, but who you know".
Great post, LL, if a bit depressing.
I agree with Camperfixer. God will have the last say, which gives me peace.
I'd also stipulate, on my treatment of White Collar Crimes equated to Blue Collar Crimes, that any suicides due to WCC be treated as associated murders, like if a guard dies of a heart attack during a bank robbery.
I think, then, the Bidens' lifespan could be measured in moments… hopefully.
Yet. Hopefully Barr & Durham are nearly ready to pull the indictment trigger (altho patience is wearing a bit thin for us regular folk).
Quite accurate…some things never change.
Only once did I deal directly with [a local] politician…took everything I said and told the press some pile of cockamamie to make herself look important. A do nothing. Later found out I was "supposed" to take her to lunch(s) for my projects success. Sorry, not on my watch.
"I didn't know that you could be white AND a victim"
Of course you can, LL! The color of your skin doesn't matter, what matters is whether you're an Eloi or a Morlock.
Silly things like Causality, Rule of Law, and Objective Reality only apply to us Morlocks; even implying that the same rules should apply to Eloi merely demonstrates your Morlock-ness.
I really have to get some "proud Morlock" tee shirts made up…
-Kle.
The "media" of my youth has mutated and morphed into the propaganda wing of the American branch of the communist party. To call them corrupt would be a vast understatement.
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