The White House can’t just wash away the stink of Hunter Biden’s laptop
The White House at some point is going to have to address Hunter Biden’s laptop.
For 17 months, Joe Biden and his aides have ignored the scandal, broken by The Post three weeks before the 2020 election.
They have denied our revelations, refused to respond to our questions, told lies, and relied on their media and Big Tech allies to censor and cover up credible allegations of corruption involving the president and his family.
But the dam is about to burst, as more Americans learn about the scandal and draw negative conclusions about Biden’s integrity.
An exclusive Rasmussen poll obtained by The Post shows a staggering 65% of voters believe it is “likely” that Joe Biden was involved in — and may have profited from — his son Hunter’s overseas business deals; 48% say it is “very likely.” More on that poll later.
The fallout for the White House is only likely to get worse. There is a limit to what Democratic spin merchants, CIA liars and false allegations of “Russian collusion” can do to bury the story.
The New York Times broke its silence last week, and admitted the laptop is real. The Washington Post also woke from its slumber and has begun investigating the laptop, recently phoning sources The Post interviewed long ago.
And, as a grand jury in Delaware moves closer to potentially indicting Hunter, 52, over alleged tax evasion, money laundering and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, pressure is mounting on the president finally to explain his role in the international influence-peddling scheme run by his son and his brother Jim Biden while he was vice president.
The laptop, along with evidence provided by Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski, and Treasury documents provided to a Senate inquiry, reveal millions of dollars flowing to the Biden family and associates from dubious foreign sources, including three flashpoint countries vital to US national security: Russia, Ukraine and China.
Evidence also exists showing that Joe Biden financially benefited from his then-****-addicted son’s overseas business dealings — perhaps by several million dollars.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki played dumb last week and refused to answer questions from The Post’s Steven Nelson about how the president is navigating conflicts of interest during the Ukraine-Russia war when it comes to sanctioning people who have done business with his family.
Specifically,
Nelson asked about Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, who has not been sanctioned, but who allegedly wired $3.5 million on Feb. 14, 2014, to a firm associated with Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer. That wire was flagged in a suspicious activity report provided by the Treasury Department to a Senate Republican inquiry, chaired by Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson.
Now, new evidence has emerged via the laptop showing that Baturina wired as much as $118 million to various offshoots of Rosemont Seneca Partners, the consulting firm co-founded by Hunter, Archer and John Kerry’s stepson, Chris Heinz.
Most of the money is believed to have been used to buy properties in Brooklyn and Chelsea for Baturina, as well as shares in commercial office buildings across the country.
Baturina, the wife of the former corrupt mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, was living in exile in London at the time after her husband fell out with the Kremlin. Perhaps this is why she has not been sanctioned by the Biden administration, although Vladimir Putin was photographed sitting beside her and hugging her at her husband’s 2019 funeral in Moscow.
Biden, as vice president, met Baturina on April 16, 2015, at a small dinner organized by Hunter in a private room of the Georgetown restaurant Café Milano. Also on the guest list were Hunter’s Ukrainian paymaster, Vadym Pozharskyi, and Kazakhstan’s then-Prime Minister Karim Massimov, now in jail for treason, and his associate, oligarch Kenes Rakishev.
Joe Biden was observed that evening sitting and eating an entire meal with Hunter and his “investors,” despite a claim by the White House to Washington Post fact checkers last year that he only attended briefly.
VP Biden also is believed to have attended a second “investor dinner” organized by his son at the end of March 2016, during another visit to DC by Pozharskyi, an executive of the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was paying Hunter $83,333 a month at the time.
Pozharskyi was in DC on March 30 and 31, 2016, the calendar in Hunter’s abandoned laptop shows.
Pozharskyi’s visit coincided with the ouster on March 29, 2016, of Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who had been investigating Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, the exiled energy minister of the former Russia-aligned government.
The month before he was removed from office, Shokin issued warrants for Zlochevsky’s arrest and seized all his “movable and immovable property,” including four houses, two plots of land and a Rolls-Royce Phantom, reported the Kyiv Post and Interfax-Ukraine.
Two weeks later, Shokin was fired by then-President Petro Poroshenko, although it took a month for parliament to ratify the decision.
VP Biden later admitted, in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, that he had forced Poroshenko to fire Shokin by threatening to withhold $1 billion in US aid for Ukraine.
Biden claimed that Shokin was corrupt.
Shokin, in turn, claimed that he was pressured to resign because he was pursuing Hunter’s boss, Zlochevsky, for corruption.
In a 2019 interview with Ukrainian publication Strana,
Shokin claimed he had been planning “to interrogate [Hunter] Biden Jr.” before he was fired. This is just one of dozens of concerning stories that emerge from any honest interrogation of Hunter’s laptop.
The president may have plausible explanations for what looks like extensive corruption during his vice presidency. But so far, he and his defenders have just tried to shoot the messenger. That tactic is not working, because the American people are rapidly getting up to speed on the laptop scandal.
The Rasmussen poll, conducted Monday and Tuesday nights, shows that more than two-thirds of voters have been “closely” following news reports about Hunter. Almost half think the story is “very important” and another 18% say it is “somewhat important.”
But the most politically lethal poll question found that 48% of voters believe that Joe Biden likely would not have been elected president “if the media had fully reported the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election.” That compares to 45% who still think it is likely he would have been elected.
This goes to Biden’s very legitimacy as president and shows that the media’s failure to report the laptop story really was election interference. It is an epic scandal that refuses to go away.
https://nypost.com/2022/03/23/the-wh...bidens-laptop/
