https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/27/hunter-biden-joe-biden-president-business-dealings?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Stealth Hunter: Biden’s tangled business dealings are becoming hard to ignore
Influence-peddling
is Washington’s ‘spectator sport’ – but now there’s an interest in
taking a closer look at the president’s son
Hunter Biden with his father in 2010. Photograph: Nick Wass/AP
To
the political right in America, Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been the
gift that keeps on giving, with his public struggles with addiction,
scandalous private life and tangled business life. To the left, Hunter’s
travails are dismissed as a Republican political obsession and a
talking point for tabloid journalism and internet gossip.
But
last week, two witnesses called before a federal grand jury seated in
Wilmington, Delaware, which is looking into the tax affairs of the
president’s son, made the subject harder to avoid.
First
there was Lunden Roberts, with whom Biden has a three-year-old
unacknowledged child. Then Zoe Kestan, an ex-girlfriend and lingerie and
textile designer, spent five hours giving testimony on Biden’s
spending, including – reportedly – stays at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where, in 2018, allegedly, Biden was preoccupied with cooking crack cocaine.
Wretched and salacious as that sounds, much of Hunter Biden’s story, detailed at length in his autobiography Beautiful Things,
published last year, tends that way. “I’m not a curio or a sideshow to a
moment in history,” Biden claimed in his book. “I’ve worked for someone
other than my father, [I] rose and fell on my own.”
Photograph: Agnes Bun/AFP/Getty Images
But that’s not how Joe Biden’s political enemies see it.
Donald
Trump tried to make issue out of Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine,
Russia and China, which included high paid consultancies and gifts, and
allegations that, as vice-president, Joe Biden had shaped American
foreign policy in Ukraine to benefit his son.
For
Trump, it backfired, when efforts to uncover information about the
Bidens and Ukraine helped to trigger his first impeachment. Then came
the surfacing of Hunter Biden’s missing laptop, with its library of
decadent pictures and business email chains, mysteriously left at a
Wilmington repair shop, which found its way to Republican political
operatives including Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, plus the rightwing
press and the FBI.
On
the political flip-side, House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff
said the laptop was a “smear” from Russian intelligence, and 50 former intelligence officials said it was probably Russian disinformation. Now, however, almost no one disputes its authenticity.
Hunter
Biden confirmed that he was under federal investigation over a tax
matter in December 2020, days after his father was elected president.
Attorney general Bill Barr said he had “not seen a reason” to appoint a
special counsel to oversee investigations, which include an
investigation by a federal securities fraud unit in New York and another
in Pennsylvania.
Biden has not been charged
with any crime, and Delaware attorney general David Weiss, who oversees
the inquiry, is regarded as a straight-shooter unlikely to be swayed by
political pressure. He was appointed by Trump on the recommendation of
the state’s two Democratic senators and has not been replaced by Joe
Biden.
Weiss, according to Politico, avoided
taking any decisions that would alert the public to the existence of the
inquiry before the 2020 presidential election – and a repeat of the
FBI’s Hillary Clinton missing emails investigation, which may have
influenced the outcome of the 2016 contest.
But
the larger question – beyond whether Hunter Biden correctly met tax
obligations during a period in which, by his own telling, he was being
paid $50,000 a month by Ukrainian firm Burisma – are Biden’s financial
ties to foreign figures and businesses while his father served as Barack
Obama’s No 2.
Illegal lobbying is an issue
that shadowed Trump throughout his presidency, leading to the conviction
of Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, on tax fraud charges.
Manafort later pleaded guilty to violating the Foreign Agents
Registration Act (Fara) by providing false statements, laundering money,
witness tampering and failing to register as an agent of the Ukrainian
government.
Last
year, Thomas Barrack, a friend and former adviser to Trump, was
arrested on charges that he and others failed to inform the US
government that they were working to influence US foreign policy on
behalf of the United Arab Emirates.
Under US
statutes, all persons acting politically or quasi-politically on behalf
of foreign entities in the US must properly disclose their activities.
In
addition to Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukraine through the gas company
Burisma, he has sat on the boards of BHR Partners, a private investment
fund backed by a number of Chinese state entities; a hedge fund,
Paradigm; a consultancy, Seneca Global Advisors; and the fundraising
firm Rosemont Seneca.
Republicans, including the senior Iowa senator Chuck Grassley,
have called on the justice department to evaluate whether Hunter or Joe
Biden’s brother James Biden should have registered as foreign agents
over their business arrangements with the Chinese government-backed
energy company CEFC.
In 2018, Business Insider
reported that Hunter Biden sought an annual $2m retainer to aid in the
recovery of Libyan assets frozen by the Obama administration during
Muammar Gaddafi’s rule. The list of accusations goes on.
According
to Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar at the George Washington University
Law School, “influence-peddling is a virtual spectator sport in the
nation’s capital – a protected corruption”.
Turley
said: “It’s how powerful ruling elites make much of their money, and
Congress has never seriously tried to crack down on it. The children and
spouses of powerful leaders continue to receive windfall payments from
companies and foreign interests, but we’ve never quite seen the likes of
Hunter Biden’s enterprises. His contracts go beyond anything we’ve seen
before.”
Joe
Biden has long insisted that his son did nothing wrong. “There’s nobody
that’s indicated there’s a single solitary thing that he did that was
inappropriate, wrong … or anything other than the appearance,” Biden
said two years ago.
But should the
Delaware panel recommend criminal charges, it could ricochet around the
second half of his father’s administration.
Like
Barr, the current US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has declined to
appoint a special counsel. But if Republicans gain control of the
legislature in November, pressure to appoint a prosecutor will certainly
build, as it did from Trump with Robert Mueller’s investigation into
Russian election meddling or with Ken Starr, appointed to investigate
the Clinton’s Whitewater investment dealings.
“I
don’t have any doubts that if they [Republicans] can, they will,” said
James Carville, architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory
and Democratic party strategist throughout the 90s, with a long memory
of politically inspired investigations.
“At
first you’re outraged, then it becomes the standard routine of everyday
life. You become battle-hardened and immune to it. I think they spent
687 hours investigating the Clinton Christmas card list – a major, major
investigation. I can’t tell you the amount of coverage and
investigations that went into Whitewater, which was nothing. [And]
Travelgate. Then you end up with an act of consensual sex and they go,
‘A-ha! We were right the whole time!’”
But for
presidential children, the stakes are different, and may have only have
risen as Washington has become more partisan. “They find themselves in
the spotlight whether they want to or not,” said Nancy Reagan biographer
Bob Colacello.
“Lynda Bird Johnson dating
playboy movie star George Hamilton, Ron Reagan dropping out of Yale to
become a ballet dancer, his sister Patti Davis marching with Nuclear
Freeze protesters, Chelsea Clinton flopping as a TV news reporter, the
Bush girls partying at downtown Manhattan clubs … all were tempests in
teapots compared to the mess Hunter Biden has got himself into with his
questionable business ventures in China and Ukraine.”
One
issue, says Kathleen Clark, a professor of Law at Washington University
in St Louis, is that the financial conflict of interest law does not
reach the adult children of elected officials. “There were similar, if
not exactly parallel, problems with the adult children of Donald Trump
trying to sell condos in India, [trying to] pursue business in other
countries,” Clark points out.
But efforts to investigate the Trump family are faltering.
Last
week, the New York district attorney’s investigation into whether the
Trump Organization – which includes Trump sons Eric and Donald Jr as
senior executives – inflated the value of assets to obtain favorable
bank loans, appeared near to collapse when two prosecutors hired for the
purpose resigned.
But the Delaware grand jury in Hunter Biden’s affairs has greater scope.
According
to Tessa Capeloto, an attorney specializing in the Foreign Agents
Registration Act at Wiley Rein, the impetus to look at
influence-peddling violations has increased since a 2016 inspector-general’s report found that Fara was not being enforced as aggressively as needed.
“There’s
been a concerted effort by DOJ to see that the statute has some teeth
and is being effectively administered and enforced. The statute is out
there for a reason, which is to ensure that certain political and
quasi-political activities undertaken on behalf of foreign interests are
reported and made transparent.”