Chances are, you didn’t hear about the 2015 event of a high-level government career official, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, notifying then-Vice President Joe Biden’s office regarding concern that his son Hunter’s more than $50,000 a month board position at Burisma holdings, a disreputable Ukraine energy company, presented terrible national conflict of interest optics which could also undermine anti-corruption efforts in that country.
Ironically, Kent expressed these observations in testimony during Democrat congressional impeachment hearings centered upon investigating former President Donald Trump’s telephone conversation with incoming Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over that same murky Hunter matter.
Kent told lawmakers that “regardless of whether anything is wrong, it looks terrible,” worrying also that officials in Kyiv would possibly consider the younger Biden as someone who could curry influence with his father.
That Hunter-Ukraine connection now takes on urgent relevance with the recent discovery of suspicious communications regarding apparent leaking of top-secret government information.
Highly detailed information in an April 13, 2014, email to fellow Burisma board partner Devon Archer on his "laptop from hell" appears to have been lifted from a strategic State Department travel briefing document just a week prior to his father’s official trip as the Obama representative to meet with then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
Another troubling Hunter laptop email dating back to 2011 offered to sell suspiciously-secretly-sourced intelligence on Russian oligarchs to the U.S. aluminum firm Alcoa Inc. for $55,000.
Some junior staff in the Obama White House at the time were reportedly alarmed about Hunter’s connection with Russian oligarchs as well as his no-show Burisma board position.
According to his laptop diary entry, on February 16, 2012, immediately after having lunch with his vice president father and then-Chinese vice president Xi Jinping, Hunter flew to Moscow to meet with Ara Abramyan, a member of Vladimir Putin’s inner sanctum, at his home.
Amos Hochstein, a special envoy on energy policy, also tried unsuccessfully in October 2015 to raise White House concerns about the bad optics of Hunter’s Burisma and Russian oligarch associations, including one direct contact with Joe Biden.
Whereas more than 50 former U.S. Intel officials later falsely dismissed the existence of Hunter’s laptop as Russian disinformation, the FBI — which had it in their possession for nearly a year until after the 2020 presidential election — clearly knew differently.
Evidence on that hard drive reveals that Hunter and his uncle Jim had far more than sensitive information for sale. They afforded U.S. adversaries opportunities for compromising extortion influence in the highest offices and innermost chambers of our federal government.
And members of the Biden family profited richly.
In addition to the $4 million in board fees Burisma paid Hunter over five years, one of his companies, Rosemont Realty, received a $40 million investment from the widow of a corrupt former Moscow mayor along with a separate $3.5 million to a bank account formed between Hunter’s Rosemont Seneca and The Thornton Group, a Boston-based consulting firm.
Then there’s China, where again according to the New York Post, the Biden family has done five deals totaling some $31 million.
The Post further observes: "Indeed, every known deal that the Biden family enjoyed with Beijing was reached courtesy of individuals with spy ties. And Joe Biden personally benefited from his family's foreign deals."
Included is a $1.5 billion deal Hunter inked for his company with the Communist state-owned Bank of China 10 days after returning with his vice president dad on a 2013 trip to Beijing aboard Air Force Two.
Then there's that 10% cut to be held for [Joe Biden] "the big guy," documented in an email communication referencing CEFC, a now-defunct energy company closely associated with the Chinese regime which reportedly paid Hunter and Jim Biden $4.8 million in 2017-2018.
There appears to be an astounding lack of comparable concern regarding the DOJ-authorized FBI armed raid on former President Donald Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago residence and multiple locations where illegally possessed Biden classified documents have been discovered — some dating back to his tenure as U.S. senator.
All currently known stashes seem to be connected in some way or other to Hunter: at the Penn Biden Center which Hunter helped launch with generous China contributions, and in Joe and Jill Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home and garage where Hunter has claimed credit card and driver’s license residence.
We now know that Hunter had also previously worked to arrange for keys to be made for "office mates" at another private office space listing his father, Jill Biden, his uncle Jim Biden, and Gongwen Dong, a person he described as an "emissary" for Chairman Ye Jianming — the chairman of CEFC.
In documents obtained by congressional committee Republicans, Hunter Biden refers to the founder and chairman of CEFC [Ye Jianming] as his “partner,” and the vice chairman of CEFC, Patrick Ho, as his client and the “f*****g spy chief of China."
Hunter's former secretary JiaQi "Jackie" Bao during the time he and his family may have garnered profits from CEFC regarding a potential U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) purchase Bao and the Bidens sought to sell to China, wrote in an email copied to CEFC associates that "my job is to make sure our interest is protected."
A looming issue now, is who can we really trust to protect America’s interests from such as them?
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.