Hunter Biden is currently the subject of a Justice Department investigation into alleged tax fraud and money laundering. Furthermore, the Republicans have vowed that if they win back the majority in the November midterms, the son of the POTUS would be summoned before a hearing to answer in-depth questions about his “shady” business dealings.
Hunter Biden and his company generated a hefty $11 million from 2013 through 2018, but he massive sum quickly burnt a hole through the presidential son’s pocket, according to NBC News.
Hunter Biden was able to bring in the aforementioned money by sitting on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, accused of bribery, and working as a lawyer, revealed the outlet’s analysis of a copy of his hard drive, iCloud account, and documents released by Republicans on two Senate committees.
However, it remains an open question what exactly Hunter Biden did to earn these millions, including from his Chinese partners now accused of fraud, the outlet writes. Accordingly, concerns have been raised about national security and business ethics.
“No government ethics rules apply to him”, Walter Shaub, a former director of the US Office of Government Ethics, was cited as saying.
Back in December 2020, Hunter Biden confirmed in a statement that he was the subject of a federal investigation for possible tax fraud, with the ongoing probe believed to also be evaluating possible violations of money laundering and foreign lobbying laws.
‘Shocking & Overwhelming’ Debts
Scrutiny of the documents taken from the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s now-infamous computer, abandoned at a repair store in Delaware, appears to indicate he was a spendthrift, NBC News stated.
From October 2017 through February 2018, Hunter Biden spent more than $200,000 per month on luxury hotel rooms, Porsche payments, dental work, and cash withdrawals, expenditures compiled on his hard drive show.
Photo of Hunter Biden relaxing in a bathtub, reportedly taken from a computer dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop.
© Photo : Image originally published by the New York Post
Indeed, in his autobiography, “Beautiful Things”, Hunter Biden admitted that he burnt through cash to pay for drugs. He also claimed that strangers he partied with stole from him. The second son of the incumbent POTUS gave an account of how he struggled to pay mortgages, alimony, and child support payments to his ex-wife.
In a February 2017 divorce filing, an attorney for Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, said the couple’s outstanding debts were “shocking and overwhelming”. While owing around $313,000 in back taxes, they racked up debts to the housekeeper, doctors, and therapists, the filing stated.
It was also revealed that Hunter Biden splurged on drugs, strip clubs, prostitutes, and girlfriends “while leaving the family with no money to pay legitimate bills”.
According to Hunter, funds he received from sitting on the board of Burisma “turned into a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction” and “hounded me to spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively. Humiliatingly. So I did”.
NBC News previously reported that an ex-business partner – Eric Schwerin, then president of Rosemont Seneca Partners – had warned Hunter Biden he should amend his 2014 tax returns to reflect the “unreported” $400,000 in income from Burisma, according to a copy of the email.
“In 2014 you joined the Burisma board and we still need to amend your 2014 returns to reflect the unreported Burisma income”, the email, dated 16 January 2017, stated.
However, a representative for Hunter Biden was cited as saying all of his tax responsibilities to the IRS have been satisfied.
Earlier, reports claimed that Hollywood attorney Kevin Morris had been advising Hunter Biden since 2020 and helped pay off the approximately $2 million Biden owed the IRS.
The scandal surrounding Hunter Biden’s discarded “laptop from Hell” and its trove of incriminating documents broke after a Delaware computer expert, who turned over the Mac Pro to the FBI, alerted then-President Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to the existence of the docs.
Giuliani, in turn, provided a copy of the hard drive to the New York Post, which came out with the story in October 2020. Ever since, both the POTUS himself and his second son have maintained that they never communicated about the questionable business dealings revealed on the hard drive.
Now, GOP congressional sources are cited as vowing to demand more documents to probe whether any of the president’s son’s income reached his father if their party manages to take back the House in the November midterms.
Walter Shaub, an ethics expert with the Project on Government Oversight, was cited as adding that it was “imperative that no one at DOJ and no one at the White House interfere with the criminal investigation in Delaware”.
The fresh scrutiny of the documents from Hunter Biden’s hard drive comes after 120,000 of the emails from the abandoned laptop were posted online by former Trump White House staffer Garrett Ziegler.
The one-time aide to Peter Navarro in Trump’s Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy uploaded the emails to a searchable database this week through his organisation Marco Polo.
Users visiting the site, BidenLaptopEmails.com, can download all the emails to their Mac or Windows computers.