Year-long study says Joe Biden was 'the central figure in his family's money-making scheme' parliamentary investigation It is led by James Comer and claims to have discovered nearly $30 million funneled into the first family's accounts.
In a new book, the Kentucky Republican details how Biden's son Hunter and brother Jim pitched the “Biden brand” to foreign governments and entrepreneurs to raise cash.
“I can honestly say that I don't know anything.” legitimate It was a business owned or operated by the Biden family,” Comer wrote in “All About the President's Money: Investigating the Secret Foreign Plan That Made the Biden Family Rich,” published Jan. 14.
The book also details many questionable obstacles that the Comer Oversight Committee and the Government Accountability Commission encountered along the way.
Those obstacles included everything from battles with top Democrats on the committee who tried to discredit the evidence Comer found, to the Washington press corps and intelligence agencies.
Comer, the committee's chairman, compared journalists in Washington, D.C., to “Democratic Party spokespeople and ad men.”
He accused officials such as the IRS and FBI of conducting “slow investigations” and leaking “false narratives” of their findings to the media.
Comer wrote that he requested more than 200 documents from the administration during Biden's first two years in office and “did not receive a single response.”
They tried to access the Biden family's bank records at the beginning of the investigation, only to beg the Treasury Department to turn them over.
An initial investigation found dozens of suspicious activity reports (SARs) were filed by at least six banks that handled transactions involving Hunter's eldest son, Hunter.
A SAR is a form that banks fill out when they discover unusual transactions that may violate the law. The form is then submitted to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, an agency within the Federal Treasury, for follow-up investigation.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen deferred Comer's request to see the SAR for two months, he alleges in his book.
When Comer and his staff finally received permission to view U.S. Treasury documents, the elevator was out of order when his team entered the building. He felt that this situation was an apt metaphor for the difficulties encountered when he tried to chase money.
“When I got to the top of the building, I said to my colleagues who were gasping for breath, 'Thank God no senators were with me, or I would have passed out halfway down.' ” he wrote about his 2023 visit.
Comer said the SARs were paramount to the investigation, and most of them had already been cited in previous reports on the Biden family's assets.
“We knew that no bank would file a SAR against the family of a sitting Vice President of the United States unless they had a strong belief that a serious financial crime had been committed,” he wrote, noting that SARs can be used for a variety of criminal offenses. From money laundering to bribery, he added.
They discovered 170 SARs related to Hunter Biden (20 more than previously known from six different banks), as well as previously unknown accounts and 20 shell companies. However, everything was managed by hunters.
“The Bidens were also the subject of an additional 50 SARs filed against others,” Comer wrote.
Analysis of Biden's bank records and testimony from Hunter's business associates before the committee shows that millions of dollars flowed from sources in China, Ukraine, Romania and Kazakhstan, Comer's book said. It has become clear.
Jim and Hunter were allegedly paid by foreign companies to find business leads and customers. But no products were sold or investment advice was provided, Comer said, adding that the shell companies were simply receiving cash for access.
From May 2014 to April 2019, Hunter received more than $5 million in compensation from Ukraine's Burisma Energy for “holding a fictitious board position,” Comer wrote. Hunter knew almost nothing about the energy sector and added that his main value was familiarity with the “Biden brand.”
In one case, Kazakh businessman Kenneth Rakishev wired Hunter $142,000 to buy a Porsche in April 2014. The cash arrived around the same time that Joe Biden dined with Chef Raki at a Washington restaurant at Hunter's request, when Joe was still vice president.
Hunter Biden's laptop contained images of expensive cars that showed him smoking crack while spinning up to 170 miles per hour.
The laptop, left at a repair shop in Delaware and first revealed by The Post in 2020, contained thousands of emails detailing Hunter's shady business dealings and struggle with substance abuse. , text messages, and photos.
Hunter Biden's lack of expertise in the energy sector did not prevent him from requesting cash from energy finance company Chinese Energy Company Limited (CEFC).
The company is associated with the Chinese Communist Party and its Belt and Road Initiative, “an international plan to build infrastructure in Third World countries by issuing loans that China knows it will never be able to pay to Third World countries.” writes Comer.
According to Comer's book, the Biden family began working with the conglomerate when Joe Biden was vice president.
Comer was able to trace the reward money shared by the Biden family through a July 30, 2017 WhatsApp call from Hunter Biden to CEFC associate Raymond Chao. In that call, he claimed that his father was sitting next to him and demanded a payment of $10 million.
On Aug. 8, Northern International Capital, a CEFC affiliate, acquired Hudson West III, a joint venture formed by Hunter and another CEFC affiliate, Gongwen Dong, as shown in the Post's diagram. transferred $5 million to.
On the same day, Hudson West III transferred $400,000 to Owasco PC, a company controlled by Hunter Biden.
Six days later, on August 14, Owasko transferred $150,000 to Lion Hall Group, a company run by Jim Biden and his wife Sarah Biden.
On August 28, Sarah withdrew $50,000 in cash from Lion Hall Group and deposited it into a joint account with her husband, Jim Biden. On September 3, Sarah wrote Joe a check for $40,000 and wrote “loan repayment” in the memo line.
Comer said he knew he had a “smoking gun” when he found a check that showed money laundering, but most of the mainstream press was unimpressed. That's despite the fact that Jim Biden, the “most incredible” witness before the committee, admitted in 2018 that he never agreed to a $200,000 loan to his brother or later “repaid it.”
Last month, the National Archives released a bombshell photo of Joe Biden introducing Hunter to Chinese leader Xi Jinping and other business leaders during a state visit to China in December 2013.
Jason Galanis, Hunter's former business associate who testified from a prison cell where he is serving 16 years for fraud, said his eldest son's main goal was to make his family “billions of dollars, not millions of dollars.'' ”
Hunter, who was convicted of firearms possession and tax evasion, was luckier than Galanis. He received a controversial pardon from his father last year.
Joe Biden was also an active participant in his son's get-rich-quick scheme, Comer wrote, and is a “big man” who received 10 percent.
During his eight years as vice president, he gave two speeches in Romania in 2014 and 2015 in which he “denounced corruption in the country, in which his family was participating.'' Mr. Biden gave his first speech on May 21, 2014.
“Corruption is just a form of tyranny,” Joe said in his speech.
In the months after that speech, Comer said, the Bidens received more than $1 million through an associate of the Biden family from a company run by Gabriel Popoviciu, a Romanian businessman under investigation for corruption. That's what it means.
Biden also lectured Ukraine on corruption at the same time that Hunter was receiving cash to serve on Burisma's board in 2016. That payment was under threat due to corruption allegations by Burisma executives.
During a panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations in January 2018, Biden said that if the Ukrainian government did not fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had been investigating the Burisma scandal, he would cut off $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine. He admitted threatening to withhold.
Biden gave him six hours to board Air Force 2 and fly home, Comer wrote.
“Biden then added the famous line, 'Son of Abu, they fired him!'” Comer wrote. Shokin was removed from office in a parliamentary vote in March 2016, and his successor closed off the investigation into Burisma.
Despite the difficulties in investigating the First Family's assets, Comer and his research team were determined to uncover what he called “the biggest corruption scandal of my lifetime.” Ta.
His work, he wrote, led to a “historic distrust of our nation's federal law enforcement” and likely contributed to Democrats' defeat in the November vote.
In the end, Comer believes his investigation gave American voters “an opportunity to decide for themselves what the appropriate form of accountability looks like for Joe Biden and his allies.”
