Two crucial emails included among the material reportedly taken from Hunter Biden’s laptop last year are genuine, according to new evidence presented in the book The Bidens by Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger.
A 2015 email from Ukrainian businessman Vadym Pozharsky thanking Hunter Biden for “giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together” is genuine, according to a person described in Politico Playbook as having “independent access” to Hunter’s emails. Pozharsky was an adviser to Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian natural gas company on whose board Hunter Biden sat while his father was vice president.
A second email from 2017 that reportedly outlines a deal between the Biden family and a now-defunct Chinese energy company is also real, the person said. That email, sent by Biden business partner James Gillar, includes the line “10 held by H for the big guy?” which Tony Bobulinski — Hunter Biden’s former business partner and a recipient on the email — said referred to Hunter holding a 10 percent stake in the deal for Joe Biden.
Both emails were first reported by the New York Post, which purportedly recovered them from a laptop that Hunter left at a repair shop in Delaware and never retrieved.
Shreckinger’s source remembered viewing both emails but was not able to compare the text leaked to the Post with the original emails. Other emails from the leaked files matched a cache of emails released by a Swedish government agency, two people who communicated with Hunter Biden said.
President Biden has insisted that he was never involved in his son’s business dealings.
Citing its hacked materials policy, Twitter censored the damning New York Post article that exposed the emails in the run up to the 2020 presidential election, blocking users from tweeting out a link to the story and from direct messaging it to other users. The Federal Elections Commission recently ruled that the censorship was not politically motivated and therefore did not qualify as an illegal in-kind contribution to the Biden campaign.
The president’s son is currently attempting to sell paintings at galleries run by art dealer Georges Bergès. The White House has agreed to an arrangement whereby the buyers will remain anonymous, however the high price of the paintings, some of which could sell for up to $500,000, has raised eyebrows.
“There is simply no way an artist who has never even juried into a community center art fair is going to suddenly show up in New York selling art for half a million a pop,” former Office of Government Ethics head Walter Shaub said on Law & Crime’s Objections podcast in August.
Shaub told CNN in July that the arrangement was “the perfect mechanism for funneling bribes.”
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