Hunter Biden faces possible indictment from the Justice Department. He’s also the subject of Congressional investigation. We explore the details behind the headlines about the president's son.
DUBLIN, IRELAND - APRIL 14: In this handout image provided by the Irish Government, US President Joe Biden departs Dublin Airport on Air Force One with his sister Valerie and son Hunter on April 14, 2023 in Dublin, Ireland. US President Joe Biden has travelled to Northern Ireland and Ireland with his sister Valerie Biden Owens and son Hunter Biden to explore his family's Irish heritage and mark the 25th Anniversary of the Good Friday Peace Agreement.
But the investigation has since narrowed. The Washington Post first reported last October that federal agents may have gathered what they believe is sufficient evidence to charge Hunter Biden. The potential charges involve three tax crimes and a false statement related to a gun purchase. Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who's been supervising the case, has yet to indict Hunter Hunter Biden. But new reporting suggests that prosecutors are nearing a charging decision.
What happens is the Justice Department looks at these instances. For example, he's on the board of a company called Burisma in Ukraine, an energy company there. He takes an equity stake after his father is vice president in a company called BHR in China. He tries to do a deal and begins to do a deal with a Chinese energy company run by this tycoon from China. And so they look at these things and they're looking to see was there money laundering? Was he lobbying? They don't find that.
I understand that Hunter Biden recently met with his attorneys, I mean, at the Justice Department, or in the Justice Department in anticipation of possibly being charged? Is this truly an urgent situation for him? I want to spend a minute really understanding the details about that, the Burisma board membership in Ukraine, because, of course, that brings in President Donald Trump when he put pressure on then new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open an investigation into Hunter Biden and Joe Biden. Remind us how Hunter Biden actually ended up on the Burisma board.
Some of the State Department officials who worked on Ukraine matters were very uncomfortable with Hunter's decision to take this position on the board because they thought it undermined their message about the importance of combating corruption in Ukraine, something that Joe Biden himself said frequently.
So I think it's hard to know why that oligarch made the decisions that he made. But I think that's part of it. He also was under investigation inside of Ukraine. He had rivals in the government at the time in Kiev. And maybe he thought that having Hunter Biden on the board would maybe intimidate some of those rivals. But again, we don't really know.
ENTOUS: Yeah, I mean, as best I can tell, Joe Biden, the vice president, finds out that his son is on the board because he gets these daily press clippings that are delivered him by members of his staff. And when he got the clippings the day after the board seat was announced for Hunter, there was a headline in the clippings that his son had joined the board.
ENTOUS: Yeah. So this is sort of an interesting episode because I think it has been so mischaracterized. What happens is there's a lot of frustration in the embassy, in the United States embassy in Kiev about whether the Ukrainians are going after oligarchs for corruption. And one of the one of several oligarchs that the Americans and the British government, you know, are accusing of potentially being involved in corruption is the oligarch that runs Burisma.
Frankly, all of this puts a spotlight once again on Hunter Biden's position on the board. And it's very uncomfortable for the Bidens at this stage because of this spotlight. So that's the story. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN : I have great confidence in my son. I love him. And he's on the straight and narrow. And he has been for a couple of years now. And I'm just so proud of him.
ENTOUS: Well, I think you have to go back in time to, you know, when they were very young and there was a terrible car accident where their mother and their baby sister died. And so Joe Biden is a single dad as a young senator, and he's got these two boys at that stage. And the family sort of all comes together to try to help him raise these these boys. And so you have this incredibly tight knit family.
What happens is Hunter has this — there's this terrible kind of curse in the family, addiction, which goes, I did this whole history of the Biden family and this is like really, really bad on both sides of the family. It goes, you know, every generation, every generation has this problem. And Joe Biden never drank and he told his sons not to drink. He pleaded with them not to drink until they were 21.
This is a constant struggle for Hunter, staying sober. But Beau is always there to try to pull him back from the brink.ENTOUS: And so he's doing this. He's playing this role, and then he's diagnosed with this cancer, which kills him in 2015. And then I like to see Beau as sort of like the safety net. He's sort of the, you know, any time Hunter Hunter's going to fall, Beau is there to kind of dust him off and get him going again.
And several of the encounters that Republicans point to between Joe Biden, who's vice president at this point, and some of Hunter's business associates from Burisma and some of the other places where he's doing business or trying to do business, that's where these encounters take place. So, for example, Hunter has a birthday party. They're having a birthday dinner.
ENTOUS: Yeah. So basically what's happening is Hunter's got the Burisma money coming in, right. But he's kind of falling behind on everything financially. He needs — He wants to try to get another big deal. And there was this Chinese oligarch that ran this energy company who was basically trying to get deals with all sorts of, you know, prominent people and people who are connected to prominent people. He mainly actually, frankly, focused on the Republican side of the aisle.
CHAKRABARTI: Well, so then we have some tape from May 10, just a couple of weeks ago, from the House Oversight Committee. The GOP part of the House Oversight Committee held a press conference to discuss its investigations into the Biden family. And while the committee found no wrongdoings by President Biden, its report allegedly found that family members received millions of dollars without merit.
And so, yes, there is a web of various companies. And Hunter has business partners for these various things. And in the case of the ones where he's partnering with others, that money is then split evenly between the various partners, and Hunter gets a chunk and the other partner gets a chunk. And what happens is that Hunter gets his third, let's say, of a payment.
ENTOUS: Yeah. No, I think, I think that's right. I mean, I think that the whole family or Joe Biden, I mean, regardless of whether — again, I don't see any, I'm not expecting DOJ, there's no information we have that that crimes were committed here with regard to Hunter working with that oligarch either in China or Ukraine or in Romania. So these are deals with these individuals that many other people are making as well. So there's there's really nothing unusual.
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