NYT Defends Hunter’s Profits for No Real Work, Citing Biden Family Sources

The New York Times on Wednesday defended Hunter Biden’s massive profits for offering no real work while Joe Biden was vice president, citing Biden family sources and former business associates — but not whistleblower Tony Bobulinski.

The report, totaling 5,426 words and written by Adam Entous, Michael S. Schmidt, and Katie Benner, bashed Republicans for promoting a supposedly false narrative about President Joe Biden’s role in the family business. Breitbart News reported Joe Biden has been involved with the family’s business at least 17 times.

“The way Republicans tell it, President Biden has been complicit in a long-running scheme to profit from his position in public life through shady dealings around the world engineered by his son, Hunter Biden,” the reporters claimed, citing the family’s “former business partners, family members and close friends” as credible sources.

The reporters’ defense of the Biden family business was framed around Hunter’s drug abuse, which they alleged could hamper investigators’ ability to bring charges against Hunter for tax and gun violations. The Wall Street Journal reported in October that Hunter’s drug abuse could be an excuse the defense could successfully use to defend the president’s son against potential charges.

Outside of the legal dilemma of Hunter’s drug abuse, the Times’ 5,426-word essay wove a story about Hunter’s history without mentioning his lack of business experience for the international enterprises he spearheaded.

The report stated Hunter initially transitioned from his domestic lobbying business to more complicated international business deals when his father became vice president. “Hunter had to scramble to find new sources of income, and by his father’s second term as vice president, he was being approached about — and seeking out — opportunities abroad,” the Times wrote.

However, little was said about why or how Hunter was appointed to the board of Burisma in 2014 with no prior experience in the energy sector or in Ukraine for a salary of $83,000 per month. Or that in 2015, Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion from Ukraine if the Ukrainian government did not fire the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.

Watch Biden recount that threat:

According to Breitbart News’s senior contributor Peter Schweizer, Hunter earned great sums of money from Ukraine for which he “offered no real work,” a statement that infers Hunter was profiting from peddling White House influence.

Instead, the Times told its readers that Hunter’s board seat was “thorny” because it “upset” American officials and “could undermine U.S. efforts, led by Vice President Biden, to persuade Ukrainian leaders to combat rampant corruption.”

“Hunter was sober, and when he accepted the board seat, he appeared to be fully cognizant of the thorny issues he would face by tying himself to Burisma while his father was overseeing U.S. policy in Ukraine,” the report reads.

Citing the Biden family and former business associates, the reporters claimed any encounter Joe Biden had with the family’s business partners in Ukraine or otherwise were “typically fleeting and involved no substantive discussions even if they provided Hunter’s associates with a degree of access to his father.”

That claim flies in the face of the family’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski’s statements. Bobulinski twice met with Joe Biden to discuss a Chinese energy business deal with CEFC China Energy (CEFC). “I directly dealt with the Biden family, including Joe Biden,” Bobulinski stated before the 2020 election.

The Times‘ reporters also ignored the large number of bank transactions flagged as suspicious by United States financial institutions while downplaying the possibility that Joe Biden shared bank accounts with his son. “[A]ccording to Biden family members and business associates, Hunter and his father never had joint bank accounts or direct access to each others’ money,” the Times claimed.

Direct evidence from Hunter’s laptop debunks the Times’s claim. In an email on April 12, 2018, Hunter stated that he had been “shut out” of one his Wells Fargo bank accounts that he shared with Joe Biden.

“Too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many profile changes and such. Happened 10 days ago too . . . My dad has been using most lines on this account which I’ve through the gracious offerings of Eric have paid for past 11 years,” Hunter wrote.

In addition, Breitbart News reported in April, more than 150 of the Biden family business bank transactions were flagged by United States banks as suspicious. Those flagged reports were sent to Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen for further review to ascertain if the Biden family was engaged in wrongdoing.

The Treasury Department has a longstanding practice of disclosing such reports to Congress, but the Biden administration has prevented transparency, which raises “questions about a possible effort to hide the Biden network’s suspicious business dealings,” according to the House Oversight Committee.

For years, wire transfers have been the tool of choice for money launderers. To mitigate the risks to financial institutions, suspicious wire transfers over $10,000 are flagged for review. Wire transactions involving more than $10,000 are also to be reported to the Internal Revenue Service.

Rep. James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, is investigating the Biden family business for nine potential violations, including money laundering, wire fraud, and tax evasion. The probes are separate from the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into Hunter Biden for tax and gun-related violations.

“I want to be clear, this is an investigation of Joe Biden,” Comer stated. “The Biden family’s business dealings implicate a wide range of criminality from human trafficking to potential violations of the constitution.”

Recent polling shows a majority of independents want congressional investigations into the Biden family business prioritized.

In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart senior contributor and Government Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter and his father flew to China aboard Air Force Two in 2013 before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China, which transpired less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism.

Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post regarding the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that the president was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a ten percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.

Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.