U.S. President Joe Biden faces possible impeachment by the United States Congress, while his son Hunter faces felony counts on several charges. Both cases are linked to Hunter’s business dealings—stretching back almost a decade—to when Biden senior served as vice president.
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to formalise the impeachment inquiry into President Biden’s involvement in the foreign business dealings of Hunter Biden. One Chinese deal, which involved the company CEFC China Energy, saw the Chinese power conglomorate transfer around $4.8 million in payments to entities controlled by Hunter Biden or Joe’s brother James Biden between 2017 and 2018.
Hunter Biden’s involvement in Ukraine dates back to 2014 when he was hired to the board of energy company Burisma, despite having no prior energy sector experience.. During this period his father Joe Biden served as Vice President to Barack Obama.
Hunter’s board membership at Burisma earned him a reputed one million dollars per year or $83,333 a month. This coincided with scrutiny for Burisma from then-prosecutor-general of Ukraine Viktor Shokin, due to alleged corruption.
March 2016 saw Joe Biden travel to Kyiv where he threatened to withhold a billion dollars in loan guarantees if the Ukrainians did not remove Shokin as the state prosecutor. Biden himself later admitted to this during an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 2018. While some claimd Biden pushed for the firing of Shokin due to his laxpursuit of anti-corruption cases within Ukraine, Shokin himself claimedd that both Joe and Hunter Biden were corrupt.
Many of Hunter’s business dealings were murky until he left his laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019. Passed on to the FBI, it eventually made its way to the New York Post newspaper, which first reported on its existence in 2020.
One 2017 email on the laptop involving a Chinese business deal of Hunter’s makes reference to “10 held by H for the big guy?”, prompting speculation as to the identity of the unnamed “big guy”. It is thought that H refers to Hunter, holding 10% of the money for transfer to this pseudonymous entity.
Speculatively,the identity of the “big guy” is Joe Biden himself, with several observers claiming that the name has been used to refer to the current President.
The Hunter Biden laptop story was actively suppressed by social media ahead of the 2020 presidential election, with the New York Post having its Twitter account locked and links to the story censored in the name of combatting “misinformation”, in a move later criticised by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
The laptop story is one of several legal problems facing Hunter Biden. Earlier this month, a federal grand jury charged him with more tax-related crimes, claiming that he avoided paying as much as $1.4 million. He is also accused of lying on the application form for purchasing a firearm.
Hunter Biden could face as many as 17 years in federal prison if convicted of the charges laid before him.
While many Republican lawmakers have called on prosecutors to investigate Joe Biden’s business dealings, no charges have materialised against the sitting president.
Instead, lawmakers have made steps to impeach President Biden, the process which allows Congress to place a sitting president on trial.
Earlier this week, the House of Representatives voted 221 to 212 to formally authorise an impeachment inquiry against President Biden, which will allow committee chairs to obtain documents and compel testimony into the Biden family’s business deals.
Meanwhile former President Donald Trump faces more criminal charges next year after being charged in several different cases. Alongside two by federal special counsel Jack Smith involving classified records and another involving the January 6th riot, there is a pending criminal case of election interference in Georgia.
Both Trump and Biden appear, so far, to be the likely nominees in next year’s presidential election, which could be fought as much in the courtroom as at the ballot box.
