As Hunter Biden faces legal issues, a spotlight has returned to largely unproven claims that the president and his son engaged in questionable deals abroad.
Topline
Hunter Biden’s ex-business partner was expected to offer details about his former friend’s foreign business dealings in closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee Monday, putting a spotlight back onto largely unproven claims that the president and his son engaged in questionable business activity abroad, a years-long fixation that has drawn GOP impeachment calls and vehement White House denials.Key Facts
Devon Archer—a former friend and business associate of Hunter Biden—was expected to tell the GOP-led House Oversight Committee he witnessed the president speaking with Hunter Biden’s foreign business partners on more than two dozen occasions, the New York Post reported, though it’s unclear whether there’s any proof to back up the allegations.
The claims tying the president to his son’s business dealings reached a fever pitch weeks before the 2020 election, when the New York Post reported emails allegedly taken from a laptop that once belonged to Hunter Biden indicate his father had contact with his son’s Ukrainian business partners while serving as vice president (Biden has denied having any contact with his family’s business associates).
Another email from former Hunter Biden business partner James Gilliar suggested his father would financially benefit from his deals—it included the line “10 held by H for the big guy,” language two former business partners told CBS was code for 10% held by Hunter Biden for his father, but Gilliar and fellow Hunter Biden associate Rob Walker have said they have no knowledge that the president was involved in any of their deals.
Despite these insinuations, House Republicans who have spent months investigating Hunter Biden have not disclosed any evidence of direct financial links between Joe Biden and his family’s business dealings.
Reporting also suggests the president has crossed paths with his son’s business associates, including when Hunter Biden accompanied his father on an official government trip to Beijing in 2013 and arranged a handshake between the then-vice president and one of Hunter’s Chinese business partners in a hotel lobby, the New Yorker reported, citing a representative of the private-equity fund the associate worked for.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) recently released an FBI form that detailed a tip from an anonymous whistleblower—described by the FBI in the document as “highly credible”—who said the CEO of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company Hunter Biden sat on the board of, paid $10 million to members of the Biden family in exchange for their help in ousting a Ukrainian corruption prosecutor.
