Hunter Biden’s law license, utilized to market himself in foreign endeavors such as earning a $1 million legal retainer in 2017 from CEFC China Energy Company’s chairman, is administratively suspended in Connecticut, while confusion exists about his D.C. Bar membership.
Hunter is forbidden from practicing law in Connecticut until he pays the $75 fee assessed to every lawyer in the state and a $75 reinstatement fee, according to Section 2-79 of Connecticut’s Practice Book. A search of Connecticut’s license database reveals Hunter failed to pay the small fee three times in two years.
The database shows Hunter’s license was first administratively suspended on March 16, 2021. The database additionally indicates Hunter was most recently flagged on June 14, 2022, for “failure to pay the Client Security Fund fee in accordance with Practice Book Section 2-70.”
It is unclear why Hunter has not paid the fee. Lawyers can pay the fee online at www.jud.ct.gov.
Lawyers are assessed the annual fee to “promote public confidence in the judicial system and the integrity of the legal profession by reimbursing clients, to the extent provided for by these rules, for losses resulting from the dishonest conduct of attorneys practicing law in this state,” the state’s Practice Book states.
The suspended status of Hunter’s Connecticut license shows it is registered at an address located in Washington, DC, at the House of Sweden, an office space he used to facilitate a Chinese energy deal with CEFC China Energy Co. In 2017, Hunter earned a $1 million legal retainer from the company’s chairman, Ye Jianming. Hunter also received a large diamond from Ye worth an estimated $80,000 in February 2017.
President Joe Biden, lower right, talks with his son Hunter Biden, lower left, as they walk up the steps with first lady Jill Biden, top left, and daughter-in-law Melissa Cohen, top right, to Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2022. They are heading to South Carolina for a week-long vacation on Kiawah Island. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Hunter appeared to cancel his lease with the House of Sweden in 2018 after the CEFC energy deal failed in 2017. The Biden family had previously negotiated a deal with CEFC whereby President Joe Biden (Big Guy) would receive a ten percent equity stake in the joint venture, Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski. In 2018, the House of Sweden agreed to return a $49,910 rent deposit to Hunter, Breitbart News first reported.
Despite being administratively suspended in Connecticut, Hunter is permitted to practice law in Washington, DC, even though there has been confusion about whether he is a member of the D.C. Bar. According to the bar’s record search, he’s been barred since 2007.
However, when Breitbart News requested comment from the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel on whether Hunter would be disciplined by the District for his Connecticut license being administratively suspended, the Office of Disciplinary Counsel claimed Hunter was “not a member of the D.C. Bar.”
The bar’s statement was consisent with the Associated Press’s reporting from 2014 in which was claimed the “Current District of Columbia bar records do not show Biden as member.” However, Hunter’s D.C. Bar license says he was admitted in 2007.
The bar’s statement mirrors reporting by the Associated Press from 2014 in which it claimed the “Current District of Columbia bar records do not show Biden as member.” However, Hunter’s D.C. Bar license states he was admitted in 2007. Both the Bar and the AP were unaware that the President’s son has been admitted to practice in D.C. for 16 years.
Breitbart News followed up by sending a screenshot of the search query of the D.C. Bar’s website that listed Hunter as a member. The D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel replied they had searched their records in error and that Hunter was indeed a member of the D.C. Bar.
Members of the public can locate Hunter’s license by searching the D.C. Bar’s records by simply searching “Biden.”
“I confirmed,” Disciplinary Counsel Phil Fox of the D.C. Bar replied. “He is admitted in D.C.; we just didn’t know his [Hunter Biden] first name was Robert when we looked him up.”
Legal experts told Breitbart News it is not mandatory for Hunter to report the administrative suspension to the D.C. Bar for failing to pay the fee, whereas it would be upon disciplinary action. The D.C. Bar also confirmed to Breitbart News that “under our rules, reciprocal discipline would not be imposed for an administrative” suspension.
Andy McCarthy, former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, told Breitbart News that Hunter’s failure to pay the fee could be an accidental oversight.
“Obviously, the failure to pay a $75 fee could just be an oversight — not uncommon with lawyers who do their own bookkeeping and aren’t good at it,” he said. “In general, I don’t think there is anything unethical about failing to pay a fee; it would be unethical to practice without a license, so to the extent the fee is a condition of the license that could be relevant.”
It is unknown if Hunter has engaged in the practice of law in Connecticut since his license was administratively suspended nearly two years ago.
President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden leave Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Johns Island, SC, after attending a Mass, Saturday, Aug. 13, 2022. Biden is in Kiawah Island with his family on vacation. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Hunter first passed the bar in Connecticut just after graduating from Yale Law School in 1997. The passage rate for first time test takers of the Connecticut bar exam is around 70 percent.
Hunter was admitted to Yale Law School by transferring from Georgetown Law School. Yale’s acceptance rate is notoriously difficult and perhaps the most difficult in the nation. According to the New York Post, former President Bill Clinton asked Yale’s former dean, Guido Calabresi, to accept Hunter into the school:
Calabresi, who had walled off the dean’s office from the admissions process at Yale Law to avoid just such pressure, told Clinton that he would not intercede. The admissions office then rejected Hunter.
But Calabresi met with Hunter, encouraged him to go to a different law school and to then apply to Yale as a transfer student. Hunter Biden went to Georgetown University Law for a year, and was admitted to Yale in the summer of 1994.
Clinton nominated Calabresi to a federal judgeship that same year. At the time, Sen. Joe Biden was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the person in charge of shepherding Calabresi’s nomination.
Hunter’s unconventional acceptance to Yale Law School is just one example of the preferential treatment he has received due to his last name. Throughout his career in law, Hunter has conducted massive international business deals in about 12 countries, making millions while his father was a U.S. official.
In 2019, Hunter admitted that if his father had not been the vice president, he would not have been able to conduct business around the world.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not, in retrospect,” Hunter told ABC News. “But that’s—you know—I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.”
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 Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China 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 on the Hunter Biden “laptop from Hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing even to have a 10 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.