Attorney General David Weiss said in a court statement on Wednesday that Hunter Biden took $3,101,258 from his Romanian partner Gabriel Popoviciu to “influence U.S. government agencies” while his father Joe Biden was vice president.
Weiss didn’t accuse Hunter of “improperly coordinating with the Obama administration,” but he did choose to indict the president’s son for alleged tax violations instead, which Republicans say isn’t fair because it doesn’t properly punish Hunter for breaking the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Even though Hunter’s sweetheart plea deal to get broad protection fell through, Weiss could still charge Hunter with breaking FARA. The judge looked closely at the special deal and threw it out. Weiss then filed separate gun and tax charges in Delaware and California. The tax trial will happen in September.
According to the court document, the Department of Justice (DOJ) plans to present evidence at the trial that includes not only Hunter’s business partner in Romania but also CEFC China Energy Co. and Burisma Holdings, two companies that paid Hunter millions of dollars when his father was vice president and a private citizen.
The filing says, “This evidence will not include proof that the defendant did lobbying work in return for this payment.”
“Instead, the proof will show that the defendant did almost no work for the millions of dollars these groups gave him,” it says.
Hunter made one of his biggest deals when members of the Biden family took money from CEFC China Energy Co., a group with ties to Popoviciu and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The House Oversight Committee discovered in 2023 that CEFC managed State Energy HK Limited, a company associated with payments of $1.3 million to the Biden family.
The committee also learned that a Biden family member, Rob Walker, got a $3 million cash transfer from CEFC through suspicious activity reports (SARs). In turn, Hunter, James, Hallie, and an unknown “Biden,” all members of the Biden family, each got $1.3 million from the $3 million bank transfer.
Hunter, who is a lawyer, also got a $1 million salary from Ye Jianming, the head of the CEFC, in 2017. Besides that, Ye gave Hunter a big diamond in February 2017 that was worth about $80,000.
In April 2014, Hunter joined the board of Burisma. This was only two years before Joe Biden said that he fired investigator Viktor Shokin, who was looking into Burisma. Despite Hunter’s lack of experience in Ukraine or the oil industry, Burisma offered him a monthly salary of $83,000, equivalent to $1 million annually, within weeks of his father’s appointment as the “point person” for U.S. policy toward Ukraine.
In 2015, people thought Burisma was moving money and stealing from the government. It was Vice President Joe Biden’s threat to withdraw $1 billion in U.S. help from Ukraine if the Ukrainian government did not fire Shokin, the prosecutor who was looking into the Burisma case, that led to Shokin’s firing.
In December, Weiss charged Hunter with nine tax offenses, three of which were felonies: failing to pay taxes, avoiding an assessment, and filing a false form.
It says that Hunter “willfully failed to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 taxes on time, even though he had the money to pay some or all of these taxes” and instead “spent millions of dollars on an expensive lifestyle.”
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