If you are really industrious, you can dig 20 pages into the A section of today’s New York Times and find a 1,700-word news story by three of its top reporters, relating that the Justice Department’s investigation of President Biden’s son, Hunter, is not merely a tax-matter. Turns out that prosecutors are probing his penchant for cashing in on his father’s political influence, through payments by overseas entities for which he did not register as a foreign agent.
Well, I’ll be damned!
Even better, if you wade 23 paragraphs into the story, you will learn that prosecutors are examining emails between Biden and his business associates that come from “a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. [Hunter] Biden in a Delaware repair shop.”
You don’t say.
You may recall that the laptop was reported on extensively by the New York Post because the emails showed that Hunter provided access to his father, then the vice-president of the United States, for a corrupt Ukrainian energy firm that was paying Hunter goo-gobs of money to sit on its board — even though Hunter had no relevant experience. (See the Post’s reporting, e.g., here, and my column here; see also my column, here, on a digital recording in which Hunter discusses his lucrative dealings with executives of a regime-connected Chinese firm, one of whom –Patrick Ho — he refers to as “the f***ing spy chief of China, and another of whom — Ye Jianming — he describes as a billionaire who “is now missing.”)
Yet, in the weeks prior to the 2020 election, the media-Democrat complex and its allies who run the big social-media platforms zealously suppressed coverage of the Hunter computer files, claiming they had not been authenticated and could be Russian disinformation (an absurd lie amplified by the Biden campaign). The Times was right there with them.
It was impossible to stifle a laugh this morning, then, upon noticing that the Times’ deeply interred mention of the laptop includes the claim that the Hunter emails “were obtained by the New York Times.” The paper also helpfully links to another of its reports which, even after being updated in September 2021 (i.e., five months after Hunter himself conceded that the computer “absolutely” might be his), continued to question the authenticity of the computer that “purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden” and to spout the “concerns over Russian disinformation.” (See also Isaac Schorr’s report, noting that the Times was still labeling the Biden laptop story “unsubstantiated” in September 2021.)
There are other laugh-out-loud aspects of the new Times reporting. Take the lede-burying headline, which begins “Hunter Biden Paid Tax Bill” — probably the least relevant detail in the story but one that gets heavy emphasis — before acknowledging that a “Broad Federal Investigation Continues.” We are reminded that, after the election of course, Hunter grudgingly acknowledged being under a tax investigation. As I’ve pointed out, that was no revelation at all — it had long been public knowledge that liens were placed on some of Hunter’s property holdings for non-payment of taxes. The Times now informs us, however, of the supposedly salient fact that Hunter has recently paid his back-taxes . . . though the paper subsequently concedes that this has no legal bearing on the question of whether he committed tax fraud and that such payments are more relevant on the matter of sentencing than guilt.
But that’s a sideshow. It has always been obvious that a federal investigation of Hunter Biden, assuming it was a serious one, had to be far more expansive than his tax problems. And sure enough, the Times is now reporting what was knowable but largely concealed before the 2020 election: The Justice Department probe, which is being run out of Delaware by David C. Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney (who started in that office under President Bush-43 and was interim U.S. attorney for two years under President Obama), is a serious one.
A grand jury is hearing testimony and scrutinizing documents.
Prosecutors are examining the intriguing streams of payments to Hunter by the Ukrainian energy company (Burisma), the Chinese conglomerate (CEFC — see my column, here), and a “company associated with a Kazakh oligarch.”
Prosecutors are scrutinizing Hunter’s business partnership with Devon Archer, who was recently sentenced on a felony securities fraud violation. (As I’ve recounted, another Biden business associate, Bevan Cooney, was also convicted. The Biden name featured in the evidence, but Hunter was not charged — though he did complain about Archer and the complications the case was causing him in the aforementioned digital recording.)
Prosecutors are looking into Hunter’s dealings with Blue Star Strategies, a super-connected Democratic consulting firm retained by Burisma while Hunter sat on the latter’s board (see our Caroline Downey’s June 2021 report on that DOJ investigation).
Prosecutors are considering whether Hunter violated federal money-laundering laws, as well as FARA, the law that requires foreign agents to register with the Justice Department.
Who knew?