Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler attempted on Monday to dispute a report from the New York Post that then-Vice President Joe Biden appeared at a dinner arranged by his son, Hunter, to meet the latter’s foreign business partners in 2015.
As Breitbart News noted, the Post story provided further confirmation that Hunter Biden had introduced an official from the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, to his father, despite Joe Biden’s denials of any knowledge of Hunter’s interests.
Breitbart News had originally reported last year that Hunter Biden had introduced Joe Biden to an oligarch from Kazakhstan, Kenes Rakishev, at the Café Milano in Washington, DC. The Post story appeared to confirm the meeting.
But the Post cites a participant in the meeting as claiming that Vice President Biden “only dropped by briefly to meet with one of the guests” and the guest happened to be a Greek Orthodox priest, suggesting all was entirely above board.
Kessler wrote:
A few hours earlier, Joe Biden had made remarks at the White House Greek Independence Day Reception, according to his official schedule. He and Karloutsos are personal friends who have known each other for 40 years. Karloutsos’s wife, Xanthi, is on the board of the Beau Biden Foundation, which fights child abuse. (Beau Biden, who had an aggressive form of brain cancer, died a few weeks after this dinner.)
Joe Biden, a Roman Catholic, also has a long history of working with the Greek Orthodox Church. In 2015, the church awarded him the Patriarch Athenagoras Humanitarian Award. “This may be the greatest honor I’ve ever received in my public life,” he declared.
Leach recalled that the dinner involved about 10 to 12 people in a private room but that Joe Biden “didn’t even sit down. He was not part of the dinner or part of the dinner discussion.” Instead, he just spoke to Karloutsos.
Kessler also claimed that the Ukrainian executive from Burisma, Vadym Pozharskyi, was not on a guest list for the event, and cited participants who said the focus of the meeting was Hunter’s work with the World Food Program.
The author of the Post story, Miranda Devine, took to Twitter to defend her story and accuse Kessler of carrying water for the Biden administration:
Last October, the Post published an op-ed encouraging readers to treat emails emerging from Hunter Biden’s laptop “as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.” The laptop has never been shown to be such.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new e-book, We Told You So!: The First 100 Days of Joe Biden’s Radical Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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