NBC News has suddenly become interested in Hunter Biden’s laptop – the same laptop they and others claimed was Russian disinformation back in 2020 – and are revealing the millions Hunter Biden made from China and Ukraine while his father was Vice President. And how quickly he spent it.
They’ve become so interested that they literally went to an associate of Rudy Giuliani to get a copy of the hard drive:
NBC News obtained a copy of Biden’s laptop hard drive from a representative of Rudy Giuliani and examined Biden’s business dealings from 2013 to 2018 based on the information available on the hard drive and the scope of the documents released by the Senate.
Here’s what they found:
From 2013 through 2018 Hunter Biden and his company brought in about $11 million via his roles as an attorney and a board member with a Ukrainian firm accused of bribery and his work with a Chinese businessman now accused of fraud, according to an NBC News analysis of a copy of Biden’s hard drive and iCloud account and documents released by Republicans on two Senate committees.
The documents and the analysis, which don’t show what he did to earn millions from his Chinese partners, raise questions about national security, business ethics and potential legal exposure. In December 2020, Biden acknowledged in a statement that he was the subject of a federal investigation into his taxes. NBC News was first to report that an ex-business partner had warned Biden he should amend his tax returns to disclose $400,000 in income from the Ukrainian firm, Burisma. GOP congressional sources also say that if Republicans take back the House this fall, they’ll demand more documents and probe whether any of Biden’s income went to his father, President Joe Biden.
The documents and the analysis indicate that few of Biden’s deals ever came to fruition and shed light on how fast he was spending his money. Expenditures compiled on his hard drive show he spent more than $200,000 per month from October 2017 through February 2018 on luxury hotel rooms, Porsche payments, dental work and cash withdrawals.
Biden has admitted to burning through cash to pay for drugs and partying with strangers who routinely stole from him, and he struggled to pay multiple mortgages or keep up with alimony and child support payments to his ex-wife. In his autobiography, “Beautiful Things,” he says the money from Burisma “turned into a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction” and “hounded me to spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively. Humiliatingly. So I did.”
In a February 2017 divorce filing, an attorney for Biden’s ex-wife said the couple’s outstanding debts were “shocking and overwhelming” and that they owed $313,000 in back taxes. According to the filing, they had bounced checks to their housekeeper and owed money to doctors and therapists. The filing alleged that Hunter Biden had spent copiously on drugs, strip clubs, prostitutes and girlfriends “while leaving the family with no money to pay legitimate bills.”
A representative for Biden says all of his tax responsibilities to the IRS are now satisfied. Two sources familiar with the matter have confirmed to NBC News that Hollywood attorney Kevin Morris began advising Biden in 2020 and arranged to pay off the approximately $2 million Biden owed the IRS.
Legal experts say, however, that paying the bill won’t relieve Biden of criminal liability or necessarily erase his debts.
NBC News analyst Chuck Rosenberg, a former Justice Department official, said that Biden’s paying what he owes could even be seen as an admission of criminal violations. Not paying taxes for many years, rather than one or two, Rosenberg said, helps establish intent, which can otherwise be a struggle for prosecutors in white-collar cases.
Paying the bill, Rosenberg said, might help Biden if he faced sentencing and “mitigate some of the damage, but it doesn’t undo the crime. That would be like returning money to a bank that you robbed. You still robbed the bank.”
We already know half of Hunter’s salary went to his dad based on a 2019 text message from the laptop, where Hunter told his daughter “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years. It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike Pop [Joe], I won’t make you give me half your salary.”
But NBC doesn’t mention that or even suggests it’s possible. So they are still covering for Joe, to be sure.
But there’s only one way Daddy Joe could have demanded half of Hunter’s salary, because he was in on it. He was part of the plan. Without Daddy Joe, there would be no Burisma or China money. So he absolutely had the leverage over his son to get half of his salary and we know, from Joe’s own admission, that he followed through:
Anyone being honest knows exactly what’s going on here.
I am glad NBC News covered some of this finally, but they are certainly late to the party and they are clearly only focused on Hunter Biden because of the criminal investigation and not his father. So this doesn’t really amount to much yet.