Hunter Biden, the son of then-US vice president Joe Biden, was appointed to the board of Burisma Holdings. He left the company in April 2019. At the same time, one of the board members was Devon Archer, a former senior adviser to John Kerry 2004 presidential campaign. Hunter Biden was a Yale-educated lawyer who had served on the boards of Amtrak and a number of nonprofit organizations and think tanks, but lacked any experience in Ukraine and just months earlier had been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine.
In an interview last month on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight, Schweizer explained, “Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point-person on policy towards Ukraine. He steered $1.8 billion in aid to that government and while he was doing so, his son got a sweetheart deal with this energy company that — we’ve been able to trace over just a 14-month period — paid $3.1 million into an account where Hunter Biden was getting paid.”
“Suffice to say, Hunter Biden has no background in Ukraine,” Schweizer noted. “He has no background in energy policy. There’s really no legitimate explanation as to why he got this deal with this energy company, other than the fact his father was responsible for doling out money in Ukraine itself.”
“It’s a huge problem,” Schweizer added. “And it goes to this question of corruption and potential payoffs and bribes that these foreign entities were making to the Bidens in exchange for hopefully getting favorable treatment.”
This comes only a few months after a New York Post op-ed in which Peter Schweizer writes:
In 2013, then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden flew aboard Air Force Two to China. Less than two weeks later, Hunter Biden’s firm inked a $1 billion private equity deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China. The deal was later expanded to $1.5 billion. In short, the Chinese government funded a business that it co-owned along with the son of a sitting vice president.
If it sounds shocking that a vice president would shape US-China policy as his son — who has scant experience in private equity — clinched a coveted billion-dollar deal with an arm of the Chinese government, that’s because it is.
The details get worse and worse and worse, the further you read — the Chinese, for instance, kept news of the deal away from the English-language portion of its website. The agreements signed came just ahead of then–vice president Joe Biden’s trips to China. The deals themselves were to buy into companies that were stealing U.S. secrets. The secrets they were after involved U.S. nuclear submarines. And Biden Junior didn’t know jack about nuclear things, Chinese things, or venture capital; he was there just for being the vice president’s son.
And both Joe and young Hunts insist nothing untoward was going on; the Chinese just chose to partner with Hunter based on his amazing business acumen, nothing more.
Schweizer writes that it’s actually a pattern of activity — Biden Junior did the same thing in Ukraine, and the ties between Hunter and Joe as the foreign cash rolled in for Hunter were even more obvious:
Consider the facts. On April 16, 2014, White House records show that Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner in the Rosemont Seneca deals, made a private visit to the White House for a meeting with Vice President Biden. Five days later, on April 21, Joe Biden landed in Kiev for a series of high-level meetings with Ukrainian officials. The vice president was bringing with him highly welcomed terms of a United States Agency for International Development program to assist the Ukrainian natural-gas industry and promises of more US financial assistance and loans. Soon the United States and the International Monetary Fund would be pumping more than $1 billion into the Ukrainian economy.
The next day, there was a public announcement that Archer had been asked to join the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company. Three weeks after that, on May 13, it was announced that Hunter Biden would join, too. Neither Biden nor Archer had any background or experience in the energy sector.
…and…
The choice of Hunter Biden to handle transparency and corporate governance for Burisma is curious, because Biden had little if any experience in Ukrainian law, or professional legal counsel, period. But that didn’t stop Burisma from paying the younger Biden what The New York Times has reported was as much as $50,000 a month while the company was under investigation by officials in both Ukraine and abroad.
Joe Biden’s trip to Kiev in March 2016, and his threats to withhold $1 billion in foreign aid if Ukrainian officials didn’t dismiss the country’s top prosecutor, Victor Shokin, take on added meaning when you consider that Shokin’s office had been leading an investigation into Burisma’s owner.
In 2016, Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s top prosecutor, was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member as well as his crooked business partner Devon Archer. That is until two years after leaving office, Joe Biden couldn’t resist the temptation to brag to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time as vice president that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor. VP Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to the country if the Ukrainian government did not fire the prosecutor.
U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.
Sources:
A couple of years later, according to an article published in the Huffington Post shortly after President Trump was inaugurated, a former top CIA official named Cofer Black joined the board of Burisma, Ukraine’s largest provider of natural gas.
Black was a “top Romney aide.” Black worked at Blackwater as a vice chairman before joining Romney’s campaign as a “special adviser” on Romney’s Foreign Policy and National Security Advisory Team in October of 2011. (source)
