Hunter Biden on Tape? Recording purports to capture candidate’s son rambling about big Chinese business, disappearing partner, and a criminal trial. By Andrew C. McCarthy
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/hunter-biden-on-tape/
I n a newly released recording, a man purported to be Hunter Biden is heard rambling about (a) his legal representation of Patrick Ho, a convicted former Hong Kong official he refers to as “the f***ing spy chief of China”; (b) his business dealings with Ye Jianming, the corrupt Chinese high roller, whom Hunter describes as “my partner, who is worth $323 billion … and is now missing”; and (c) his complaints about his “best friend in business, Devon” — presumably, Devon Archer, the now-convicted fraudster who was Hunter’s business partner — who had “named me as a witness without telling me in a criminal case and my father without telling me.”
Quite the crowd the Bidens run with.
While no date has been given for this recording, I theorize that — assuming it is authentic — it happened in approximately May 2018, for reasons I’ll get to.
The recording is the latest installment of information presumably from Biden’s laptops, which is being rolled out by Raheem Kassam, using his new project, The National Pulse. Kassam is a British commentator and former UKIP party adviser who is close to Steve Bannon — Kassam ran Breitbart-London when Bannon was Breitbart’s executive director.
Bannon is currently facing federal fraud charges. He is, of course, a former White House adviser who had a falling out with President Trump but has retained ties with him. Bannon was one of the prominent Trump outside advisers (Rudy Giuliani being the other) whom the New York Post identified as having alerted the paper to the existence of the Hunter Biden materials. Kassam appears regularly on Bannon’s War Room broadcasts — and, indeed, they appeared together Tuesday and played what they represented to be the Hunter Biden recording.
If the recording is authentic, it would be considered big news . . . if the media were covering the Biden corruption scandal . . . which they undoubtedly would be doing if it were a Trump corruption scandal.
In the recording, the man purported to be Hunter begins by stating:
I get calls from my father to tell me that the New York Times is calling but my old partner Eric, who literally has done me harm for I don’t know how long, is the one taking the calls because my father will not stop sending the calls to Eric.
This appears to be a reference to Eric Schwerin, the president of Rosemont Seneca Partners, which Hunter Biden founded with Devon Archer and Chris Heinz (the stepson of close Joe Biden friend John Kerry, who was Archer’s college roommate). Schwerin has been tied in to the Bidens for years. Kassam has reported on 2015 emails in which Hunter recounts that Schwerin lobbied him for a job in the new Obama-Biden administration right after the 2008 election, and that Schwerin was eventually named to the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. The Post Millennial, a conservative outlet in Canada, has reported on a May 13, 2014, email in which Schwerin instructed Hunter to have the corrupt Ukrainian firm Burisma remove from its website a photograph of then-Vice President Biden posing with Archer. Schwerin has recently locked his Twitter account — which Kassam’s National Pulse says was done after his name was mentioned in its reporting.
In the recording, the speaker alleged to be Hunter Biden then turned to the subject of Patrick Ho and Ye Jianming:
I have another New York Times reporter calling about my representation of Patrick Ho — the f***ing spy chief of China who started the company that my partner, who is worth $323 billion, founded and is now missing. The richest man in the world is missing who was my partner. He was missing since I last saw him in his $58 million apartment inside a $4 billion deal to build the f***ing largest f***ing LNG port in the world.
Besides his investment activities, Hunter Biden graduated from Yale Law School in 1996 and dabbles in the private practice of law. The New Yorker has reported that he agreed to represent Chi Ping Patrick Ho in 2017, at the request of Ye Jianming. Ye, who had deep ties to Communist China’s military and intelligence services, was the head of the Chinese energy giant CEFC, which he and Ho started.
Ho, who was recently released from U.S. federal prison (and may have been deported), was the home-affairs secretary for the government of Hong Kong in the early 2000s. He later started a U.N.-certified non-governmental organization that was underwritten by CEFC. This enabled him to ingratiate himself with African politicians, whom he lavishly bribed in order to further CEFC’s business interests.
In March 2019, Ho was convicted in federal court, in the Southern District of New York, on several corruption charges, including violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. He was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. As the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy has reported, the Justice Department also “accused Ho of helping with Iranian sanctions evasion and working to use the Chinese company’s connections to sell weaponry to Chad, Libya, and Qatar.”
When Ho was arrested, Ye, who was deeply implicated, immediately called Joe Biden’s brother, Jim, who has said he believed Hunter was the intended recipient of the call. Hunter agreed to represent Ho because Hunter was working with Ye on a liquefied-natural-gas deal that could have been worth tens of millions of dollars. While they were negotiating the deal, Ye presented Hunter with a thank-you card in addition to . . . yes . . . a 2.8-karat diamond. That appears to have been the CEFC way of doing things, which seems to have been fine with the Biden family.
We should note that it was in connection with the CEFC negotiations that Tony Bobulinski was brought into the transaction. Bobulinski was the subject of an extensive interview by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night. In connection with the deal, Bobulinski met with Joe and Jim Biden. Moreover, Bobulinski has authenticated an email in which Joe Biden is referred to as “the big guy” who was to get a 10 percent stake in the CEFC deal, which Hunter would hold for him.
The CEFC deal as contemplated fell through in summer 2017, but as the Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel has detailed (relying on a Senate report compiled primarily by Republican senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley), Hunter and other Biden family members may have profited anyway: Ye opened a line of credit to which Hunter, Jim Biden, and Jim’s wife, Sara, were given access, and they made over $100,000 in luxury purchases; plus, Hunter’s law firm was paid $4.7 million in “consulting” fees during a one-year period.
Ye has been detained in China since early 2018.
The alleged Hunter Biden recording concludes as follows:
And I am receiving calls from the Southern District of New York from the U.S. attorney himself. My best friend in business Devon has named me as a witness without telling me in a criminal case and my father without telling me.
Devon Archer was convicted in the Southern District of New York in a $60 million fraud scheme. Another Hunter Biden business associate, Bevan Cooney, also was convicted. The Biden name featured in the evidence, but Hunter was not charged in the case.
I suspect that the recording, if it is authentic, probably occurred in approximately May of 2018. Biden mentions that Archer named Hunter and Joe Biden as witnesses in a criminal case. Archer’s trial began in mid-May 2018. It is a common practice in the Southern District of New York for the court, in criminal cases, to direct the parties to exchange witness lists shortly before trials commence. Such lists are not for public consumption. Attorneys exchange them in order to prevent delay during the trial (otherwise, each side would have to ask for continuances in order to do some investigation before challenging an unnoticed witness’s testimony on cross-examination). The lists are often over-inclusive (because the failure to give notice of a potential witness can result in delay or in the court’s refusal to permit the testimony), and there is no requirement that people named in the list actually be called as witnesses. It is thus not uncommon that people named on such a list are not told about it.
If Hunter was, in fact, getting calls from the U.S. attorney, or at least from an assistant U.S. attorney, it would likely have been because prosecutors were seeking an interview in order to prepare for his potential testimony. It appears that Hunter Biden was not called as a witness at the fraud trial (see this Wall Street Journal report).
Raheem Kassam began rolling out Hunter Biden materials on Monday. The first report centered on a February 24, 2016, email said to be from Hunter to Miguel Aleman Magnani, who is identified as the CEO of Interjet, the Mexican airline. Magnani’s grandfather was the president of Mexico, and his father is among the country’s wealthiest men.
In the email, Hunter reportedly related that he would be arriving in Mexico City with his father, then-Vice President Biden, aboard Air Force 2, and that he would be attending the VP’s meeting with “President N” — presumably, a reference to Mexico’s then-president Enrique Peña Nieto. The Bidens were accompanied by Jeffrey Cooper, an asbestos plaintiff’s lawyer and big-bucks contributor to Joe Biden who lobbied then-Senator Biden to kill litigation-reform bills. Cooper also underwrote some of Hunter’s investment ventures.
In the email, Hunter Biden complains that Magnani has been ignoring him, except when “you respond when it’s something you need.” He continues:
You are the most generous person I know, but WTF. We have so many great things to do together and I want you at the plane when the the [sic] VP lands with your Mom and Dad and you completely ignore me…. I haven’t heard from you since I got you a mtg for Carlos and your Dad. We have been talking about business deals and partnerships for 7 years. And I really appreciate you letting me stay at your resort villa … but I have brought every single person you have ever asked me to bring to the F’ing WHite House [sic] and the Vice President’s house and the inauguration and then you go completely silent — I don’t hear from you for months. I don’t know what it is that I did but I’d like to know why I’ve delivered on every single thing you’ve ever asked — and make me feel like I’ve done something to offend you.
I think I’m going to leave that one right there.
There is no obvious reason, on the face of it and given the context, to conclude that the email is fraudulent. Thus far, the Biden camp is not acknowledging the authenticity of the Hunter Biden materials, but neither are Biden surrogates claiming the materials are a fabrication. The Biden campaign and Democrats seem, instead, to be hoping that if they say “Russian disinformation” enough times, the Hunter computer problem will go away. So far, the mainstream media appear content to play along with this strategy. To be sure, since Steve Bannon is involved in the sudden emergence of these emails, documents, recordings, videos, and photographs, his connection to President Trump is reason enough to question whether they are genuine. But again, the Bidens — the people in a position to claim the materials are phony if that is the case — are not claiming they are phony. So shouldn’t the media be asking hard questions about them?
Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. @AndrewCMcCarthy
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