CLAIM: “To date, the president’s Republican critics have found little meaningful evidence tying his conduct to his son’s finances,” the Washington Post argued Monday.
VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE.
Associates from BHR Partners, a Chinese state-backed investment fund that Hunter Biden co-founded, noted an account linked to President Joe Biden’s home address as the beneficiary of two wires in July and August of 2019 totaling $260,000, according to the House Oversight Committee. Hunter Biden did not reside with Joe Biden in Delaware at the time of the payments, court documents from Hunter Biden’s collapsed plea deal show.
In addition, according to Hunter Biden’s text messages and emails, he shared a bank account with Joe Biden and paid some of his father’s expenses. Hunter Biden also listed Joe Biden’s Delaware house as the billing address for his personal credit card and Apple account in 2018 and 2019.
During the House Oversight Committee’s probe into the Bidens, several tranches of Biden business bank records were discovered. Those showed the Biden business received at least $20 million from business schemes in Romania, China, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Nine Biden family members received payments from family foreign business ventures, including two of Joe Biden’s grandchildren.
Legal scholar Jonathan Turley argued during Thursday’s impeachment inquiry hearing that monetary benefits to Biden family members are benefits to Joe Biden and, therefore, implicate him in wrongdoing.
WATCH — Jonathan Turley: Evidence Supports Impeachment Inquiry
“Courts have found that various benefits to family members can be attributed as a benefit to the principle. That has included everything from throwing a golf contest in the favor of a son of a politician to paying for gifts,” he said.
Polling shows that 62 percent of voters contend Joe Biden “participated” in his family business deals, according to a February Harvard Cap/Harris poll. Fifty-one percent of voters believe Joe Biden committed a crime with Hunter Biden, according to a September Yahoo/YouGov survey. Sixty-one percent of Americans say Joe Biden was involved in his family’s business deals with China and Ukraine, according to a September CNN poll.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.