The US Republicans had already zeroed in on Hunter Biden before the last presidential election, rather unsuccessfully. But their new majority and a possible re-election of the president in the coming year as well as that of his opponent Donald Trump, who lost in 2020, are spurring on their efforts again. They are also gaining momentum from the President’s document affair: several tranches of government documents classified as confidential were found in Joe Biden’s former office and private home.
The White House will try to downplay the affair. But if the appointed special prosecutor finds out that the documents contain current, sensitive or embarrassing secrets, Biden could be uncomfortable – Republicans will do their best to make it happen.
As leading Republican Congressman James Comer put it in November, before the allegations broke, “The reason we’re investigating Joe Biden is because we want to find out whether the President and the White House, through the millions of dollars that his… family has received from our opponents in China, Russia and Ukraine.” And: “The President’s involvement in the enrichment of his family is, in short, abuse at the highest level.” Accompanying the press conference, the Republicans published a 31 -page interim report entitled “A President Compromised”.
Controversial Ukraine and China deals
Hunter Biden has long faced allegations of using his father’s political career to his advantage. The focus is on his business activities in Ukraine and China – they go back to the time when his father was Vice President under Barack Obama (2009 to 2017). Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Obama entrusted Biden with Ukraine agendas. Almost at the same time, his son became a member of the board of directors of the major Ukrainian gas producer Burisma. According to the Guardian, Hunter Biden earned more than $50,000 a month there over a period of five years.
According to Senate Republicans, Hunter Biden’s job may have created a conflict of interest. Last year, more than 30 of them called for a prosecutor to be given the power to conduct an investigation into alleged “tax fraud, money laundering and foreign lobbying violations.” However, they could not present any evidence that US politics had been influenced or that Joe Biden himself had enriched himself or rendered favors.
Hunter Biden’s job in the Ukraine had already caused an uproar: As became known through a CIA whistleblower, Trump had urged the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj in a telephone call in July 2019 to start corruption investigations against Biden. Trump was subsequently accused of tying US military aid to this “request.” After it became known, impeachment proceedings were initiated against Trump, but this was rejected by the Republicans in Congress.
Laptop with plenty of explosives
Hunter Biden also received consultancy money from China when his father was still vice president. Above all, however, one deal after his term of office is controversial: In August 2017, Joe Biden’s son and his uncle Jim Biden entered into a cooperation with the energy and financial conglomerate CEFC China Energy, which mainly involved investments in the production of liquid natural gas in Louisiana should have. At the time, the Bidens were paid $4.8 million (€4.5 million) for their services. Hunter Biden ended his service abroad when his father ran for president.
The confusion around him received additional explosives from data from his laptop. In April 2019, Hunter Biden reportedly brought him to Delaware for repairs but never picked him up. The owner of the computer shop, a supporter of then US President Donald Trump, finally handed the laptop over to the FBI in December 2019 and requested an investigation into the contents. He had previously made two copies of the hard drive, one of which came into the possession of Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani in September 2020.
The hard drive contained 217 gigabytes of data, including 130,000 text messages, 154,000 emails, over 2,000 photos and over 1,000 videos, the French-language Canadian daily “La Presse” recently wrote. The conservative tabloid “New York Post” published an article about the “secret Biden emails” shortly before the 2020 presidential election. Because they were not given independent access to the data, reputable US newspapers mistrusted the story, and Twitter and Facebook restricted the story from spreading for fear of targeted disinformation.
Food for “Twitter Files”
Again, found food for the US Republicans. In their November interim report, they noted, “The story of Hunter Biden’s laptop is the best example of how partisan behavior by tech companies can benefit Democratic candidates and affect election results.” New Twitter owner Elon Musk jumped on them in early December with the “Twitter Files” intended to show how the “suppression of freedom of expression” worked before the presidential election.
Musk made internal emails available to journalist Matt Taibbi to investigate the background. The results were sparse, as the then Twitter boss Jack Dorsey had described his company’s reaction as wrong shortly after the laptop affair after a lot of criticism. The block was soon lifted, and Twitter publicly apologized for the misjudgment.
Former Twitter executive Yoel Roth, who attended regular meetings of America’s top security agencies, also said it was a “mistake” to censor the New York Post story. Alleged threats of disinformation and hacking threats in the run-up to the presidential election led to the decision.
US Democrats are arming themselves
Meanwhile, according to The Washington Post, the Biden camp is already preparing vigorously to defend the president’s son against the expected Republican attack – albeit lacking a unified strategy. For example, Kevin Morris, a friend and lawyer of Hunter Biden, advocates taking more aggressive action and pursuing defamation lawsuits against well-known critics.
Morris, a Hollywood attorney and novelist who has worked with celebrity clients and the creators of the TV series South Park, became friends with Hunter Biden in 2019 when the president’s son was recovering from what he says was a serious drug addiction. He is said to have settled an alleged $2 million tax debt for Biden — which is the subject of investigations.
Others argue that Hunter Biden and Morris should stay out of the limelight so Democrats can focus on portraying the Republican investigation as purely partisan. “Nobody thinks this strategy of putting Hunter Biden front and center is wise,” a Democrat involved in the effort told the Washington Post. “Neither does the White House.”
processing of drug addiction
The president’s son is also threatened with adversity from other quarters. The federal authorities have been investigating him for tax evasion and a false declaration for some time. When buying a gun in 2018, Biden junior is said to have concealed his drug use. For years he struggled with serious addiction problems, including cocaine and crack.
That’s what Hunter’s 2021 memoir, Beautiful Things, is about. In it he writes, for example, “I would get some dope on the streets of Washington, cook crack at an LA hotel, and couldn’t walk fifty yards from the liquor store to my apartment without popping the bottle on the street.” Hunter’s mother and his sister died in a car accident when he was two years old. He and his older brother Beau were injured. Beau Biden, then Delaware Attorney General, died of a brain tumor in 2015.
Republican risk game
Biden’s coming to terms with his battle with alcoholism and substance abuse has also earned him sympathy. David Brock, a journalist, Democrat activist and president of Facts First USA, a new group opposing the congressional investigation, believes that a concerted Republican attack on Hunter Biden could backfire.
“Prosecuting someone who is addicted and has mental health issues is sadistic politics and I don’t think that gets across to the American people,” he told the Guardian. “The hunter-hater narrative has been circulating for three years. It hasn’t really gained traction outside of the far right, and I don’t think it ever will.”
Also criticized as an artist
But even Hunter Biden’s new career as an artist has drawn criticism. The opening of his second solo exhibition took place in December, the price for the most expensive painting was set at $225,000. Biden is represented by the Georges Berges Gallery in New York, which has reportedly reached an agreement with the White House to price the artworks and not reveal who bid for or bought them. And so Hunter Biden has to be accused again of using his father’s name to make a career.
