It all started with a headline. The tabloid New York Post, which belongs to Rupert Murdoch’s media group and whose reporting is clearly right-wing, headlined in October 2020, “Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced a Ukrainian Businessman to His Vice Presidential Father”. That email was on a laptop delivered to a repair shop in Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware.
It was not immediately possible to verify that the record containing the email actually came from Biden’s son Hunter. It was also suspected that Russia was behind it. Major media reported cautiously, Twitter and Facebook even blocked associated content. But the news was out, and it wasn’t well read at the time, just weeks before the all-important presidential election in which Hunter’s father tried to defeat Donald Trump. The latter had already tried to harm Biden during the election campaign more than a year earlier by attempting to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj into re-investigating Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where Hunter worked — leading to an initial, ultimately unsuccessful impeachment trial .
The laptop story was clearly campaign journalism. But it raised questions that lingered with Biden: Had the former US vice president’s son used his position to turn a profit? And did the father know about it? Did Biden even get involved in Ukrainian politics for the purpose of helping his son with his business?
A constructed investigation
Questions that the Republicans around Trump are only too happy to answer. The contents of the laptop would have ended up in the New York Post through his lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Months later, the New York Times also verified parts of the laptop’s data, which Hunter Biden apparently handed in to the repair shop in 2019 but never retrieved.
Now, more than three years later, Republicans are once again hoping to capitalize on Hunter Biden’s laptop. As announced, they are using their new majority in the US House of Representatives to transform its organs into Joe Biden committees of inquiry. His son’s business dealings must be investigated, writes the new chairman of the Parliamentary Oversight Body, to clarify Joe Biden’s role in it and whether he has “endangered national security at the expense of the American people.”
It is a fabricated investigation in the sense that it is purely political in nature, not legal. And yet she could harass Biden for months to come — with subpoenas and interrogations of confidants, but most of all with the public light she drags his son into. And that at a time when he himself has a growing credibility problem, given the classified government documents found in the offices and residences he uses.
Hunter Biden wasn’t just a liability for his father’s political career since the laptop thing. The 52-year-old studied law at the elite Yale University, but it never became a real show career, certainly not after the example of his father. He was already addicted to alcohol in the early 2000s, had to leave the Navy reservist due to his cocaine use, after the cancer death of his brother Beau – whom the father spoke of as “Joe Biden 2.0” and who at the same time took care of him, Hunter – his addiction problems escalated to the point that he was using crack.
And despite the good contacts that life as the son of a popular politician brought with it, he seemed constantly on the lookout for new ones. He has worked as an investor, hedge fund manager, advisor, lobbyist and lawyer and served on several committees. One of them attracted particular attention: the board position of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Hunter hired Biden there in 2014 through an acquaintance — even though his father had been put in charge of relations with Ukraine by President Barack Obama, who had just witnessed the Euromaidan revolution. Biden, on behalf of the United States, urged more effective anti-corruption efforts in the country after the change of government. As a result, the Ukrainian Attorney General was fired – who, among other things, had launched an investigation into Burisma’s boss on suspicion of abuse.
No note in the calendar
From what we know today, it was a coincidence. But in retrospect, details like this make it all too easy for Republicans, and the New York Post as their mouthpiece, to paint the whole thing differently: namely, that there were mutual benefits in the father-son business triangle.
In 2015, Hunter Biden held a fundraising dinner in New York, which his father also attended. Also present was a certain Vadym Pozharskyi, a high-ranking Burisma manager. He later wrote the email with which the New York Post opened his story, thanking Hunter Biden for the opportunity to meet his father. Biden would only have been there briefly that night to see Hunter and not even speak to Pozharskyj.
There is no evidence to the contrary, the meeting was not noted in Biden’s diary and whether Hunter had hoped his father’s performance would score points at Burisma, only he knows. It was not a disadvantage, as much as one can deduce. After all, Hunter Biden stayed with Burisma until 2019, receiving about $600,000 a year. Not enough to cover his rent, alimony and – as he later admitted – addictive substances. He owed taxes and hid his drug use when buying a gun. Law enforcement authorities are now investigating both, but not because of the connections to Ukraine.
Nevertheless, they are worth their weight in gold for the narrative of the government capital of Washington as a “swamp,” which Republicans tirelessly promote. Another country where Hunter Biden suddenly entered into business relationships in recent years is likely to play a much larger role in the investigations in the House of Representatives: China.
Between 2017 and 2018, CEFC, a Chinese energy company, paid nearly $5 million for a liquefied natural gas project in the US brokered by Hunter and his uncle James – Joe Biden’s brother – with a diamond as a gift in Hunter’s hotel room. The project was never realized; the Chinese contacts were later arrested on charges of corruption in other cases, one in the US and one in China. The laptop also plays a role here: in e-mails from CEFC, there is said to be a ten percent share for someone who is called “the big guy” there. And according to the Republicans around James Comer, the new chairman of the parliamentary oversight body, that can only mean Joe Biden.
Biden denies any knowledge of this, and again, there is no evidence to the contrary. But the mere fact that China is of central importance to the president in terms of foreign and security policy and that two of his relatives have made millions there is, of course, explosive.
Took advantage of Dad’s office
A 2020 investigation by a then Republican-majority Senate found no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden regarding Hunter’s ties to CEFC; Incidentally, not in Burisma either. However, the senators wrote in their report at the time that Hunter Biden “benefited from Joe Biden’s vice presidency.” And they left no doubt that, despite the evidence, they didn’t want to change their minds that this wasn’t right: Hunter Biden was a Secret Service “protégé” while working at Burisma, conflicts of interest were “ignored” . been.
Trump had spread the story that caught on much more openly: the Biden family was corrupt. Now that Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives and access to investigative powers, they are taking the opportunity to make this story big again – and much more aggressively than before. It is also about repaying the Democrats for the impeachment proceedings they initiated against Trump.
A drug-addicted son would have been troublesome enough for a president, but Hunter Biden — who says he’s clean now — with his businesses and life bordering on the legal, is every government adviser’s nightmare. They both say that he rarely discusses business with his father. Nevertheless, he made him the target of political attacks.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Biden reportedly told Hunter when he switched to Burisma. In retrospect, he may wish he had been clearer.
This article was first published on Zeit Online. Watson may have changed the headings and subheadings. Here’s the original.
Soource :Watson
I am Amelia James, a passionate journalist with a deep-rooted interest in current affairs. I have more than five years of experience in the media industry, working both as an author and editor for 24 Instant News. My main focus lies in international news, particularly regional conflicts and political issues around the world.
