Thursday, October 15, 2020

More NYPost: Hunter E-Mails Show Big Paydays From China

 By ED MORRISSEY | HotAir 


The same hard drive files that the New York Post claims came from Hunter Biden’s hard drive not only show connections between Joe Biden and the Ukraine, but also more about Hunter’s business in China. The connections between the Biden family didn’t end with that already-infamous ride-hitching on Air Force Two in 2013. Starting in 2017, Hunter was cutting shady deals worth millions — at least according to the data uncovered by the Post.

All the same caveats apply to this story as yesterday’s, of course, including the timing of the discovery of these files and especially the strange story of the laptop itself. Skepticism should abound, but consider this a thought experiment. Just how many stories based on the NYP’s claim to have Hunter Biden’s hard drive files can Twitter and Facebook spikeLet’s find out.

Hunter Biden pursued lucrative deals involving China’s largest private energy company — including one that he said would be “interesting for me and my family,” emails obtained by The Post show.

One email sent to Biden on May 13, 2017, with the subject line “Expectations,” included details of “remuneration packages” for six people involved in an unspecified business venture.

Biden was identified as “Chair / Vice Chair depending on agreement with CEFC,” an apparent reference to the former Shanghai-based conglomerate CEFC China Energy Co.

His pay was pegged at “850” and the email also noted that “Hunter has some office expectations he will elaborate.”

Be sure to read it all, even if you have to dodge the censors on social-media platforms to do it. It’s a fun read, but it’s not nearly as much of a bombshell as yesterday’s — even if one is inclined to trust that story or this one. Yesterday’s exposé was all about Joe Biden, with a so-called “smoking gun” that contradicted his denials about involving himself in Hunter’s business. The e-mails, if authenticated, would show that Joe was meeting with Burisma execs on Hunter’s behalf before intervening to get Ukraine’s chief prosecutor fired. Joe has consistently denied all of that, so if that e-mail is both real and accurate (as opposed to fake but accurate), it would be — to use Joe’s term — “a big f***ing deal.”

Today’s story, however, is all about Hunter’s business in China. In fact, even if this all turns out to be authentic, Team Biden could turn it around on their critics. All of the business described in this story took place after Joe left office, and when Joe clearly had no juice in the government on which to trade. “Hunter’s business had nothing to do with his father,” they could claim on this story, and hope people assume it to be the case with Ukraine as well. Joe was already planning another presidential run, of course, but in 2017 there wasn’t any reason to think that the Democrats would only lock in on an old white man for their next nominee, either.

The only hint that this might go up the chain to Joe is a cryptic reference to a shadow stakeholder called “the big guy”:

In addition, the email outlined a “provisional agreement” under which 80 percent of the “equity,” or shares in the new company, would be split equally among four people whose initials correspond to the sender and three recipients, with “H” apparently referring to Biden.

The deal also listed “10 Jim” and “10 held by H for the big guy?”

Neither Jim nor the “big guy” was identified further.

The NYP doesn’t extrapolate that out to Joe, and for good reason. Even if this was on the level, a scheme like this would be unlikely to involve a man who might have to fill out financial disclosures and who was already making a fetish of releasing tax returns. The “big guy” was likely someone else, if this is real in the first place.

Moreover, we’re already aware of Hunter Biden’s business efforts in China. It’s been the subject of ads from Team Trump in this cycle, mainly last year in the primaries. This might prompt some new ads on social media, assuming Twitter and Facebook have wised up about making Trump and his supporters into victims of corporate speech suppression since late yesterday. We’ll soon find out, but if this is the NYP’s first follow-up to their bombshell yesterday, that first shot might also be the last that involves Joe directly.

https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/10/15/nypost-hunter-e-mails-show-big-paydays-china/

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RELATED ARTICLE

Hunter Bidengate: Fredo With a Crack Pipe, Castro With a Social Network

By SCOTT MCKAY | American Spectator 

Hunter Biden (YouTube screenshot)

 Facebook fascists suppress the most critical piece of journalism in the 2020 election cycle.

In the immortal film Godfather Part II, there is an equally immortal scene that takes place in a Havana sex club just prior to Fidel Castro seizing the reins of power in that country. Michael Corleone, the head of the Corleone crime family, overhears his gormless older brother Fredo referencing prior knowledge of a gangster named Johnny Ola and realizes his brother has betrayed him.

“I know it was you, Fredo,” he says later, in a signature scene in motion picture history. “You broke my heart.”

This week we learn that real-life Fredo Corleones exist, and particularly in American politics. Take, for example, one Hunter Biden, who can out-Fredo Fredo himself for sheer immoral stupidity.

After all, who but a moron records himself smoking crack while engaging in extramarital sex? This describes Hunter Biden, so you’ll know; on the same computer hard drive where the biggest news of the week was found was a 12-minute video of Hunter’s flagrant vice.

Normally, crack and hookers would be October Surprise enough. But Hunter’s Fredo-ing goes much further. Wednesday’s New York Post landed the biggest journalistic marlin of the 2020 election cycle:

Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post.

The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email reads.

An earlier email from May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma’s No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s behalf.

The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

Hunter might not be the only Fredo in the Biden camp.

The computer in question was water-damaged and taken to a repair shop in Delaware by somebody from the Beau Biden foundation … and then left there. The owner of the shop couldn’t track down the customer, and then got curious about what was on it. Once he hit that mother lode, he contacted President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the FBI.

Biden’s campaign put out a statement in response to the New York Post piece, which couldn’t be less convincing in denial. They don’t deny Biden met with Pozharskyi, they just say the meeting wasn’t on Biden’s official schedule.

Well, no kidding — putting that meeting on his official schedule would be like taking out a billboard ad somewhere along the Beltway saying, “I’m owned by Burisma.” One would hope somebody that stupid wouldn’t be vice president, but on the other hand …

Now the Senate, which has already laid out the Biden–Ukraine sleaze, is investigating the substance of what’s in the New York Post story, which includes emails where this Pozharskyi character is explicitly asking Hunter Biden to use his influence to put a stop to a prosecutor investigating Burisma — Pozharskyi claims in the email that the investigation is a shakedown, and he might well be correct, but that hardly exonerates the Bidens for monetizing Joe’s influence as vice president.

Essentially, this is the proof that everything Joe Biden has said about his son, Burisma, and Ukraine is a complete lie, and that Biden and his Fredo son are as mobbed-up as the Corleones where it comes to their dealings in that former Soviet republic.

If you don’t already know this, you’re incurious — to put it mildly.

But it’s rare when you can get this level of proof even of the obvious.

Hunter Biden got a million-dollar board position with a company in an industry of which he had zero knowledge in a country with which he had no familiarity, solely for that company’s purpose of buying a sitting American vice president who had been made the point man on foreign policy with that country.

This really can’t be disputed anymore thanks to the New York Post‘s reporting, and to call it disqualifying to Biden, even in the absence of anything else already in the hopper where he’s concerned, might even be charitable.

This is the kind of bombshell that should ruin not just Biden but his party’s down-ballot contenders.

It casts an impression that the entire Democrat Party is a criminal conspiracy, so open was Biden’s corruption and so shameless was the Democrats’ attempt to cover up the Ukraine mess by impeaching Trump for having mentioned it in a phone call with that country’s new premier last year.

But will it have that effect? Probably not.

Why not? Because the American corporate legacy media, every bit as corrupt as the Biden family, is actively suppressing the story.

You already knew that would happen, of course. But what you might not have expected was this:

While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want to be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.

That’s from a tweet by Facebook’s Policy Communications Director Andy Stone, a former Democrat campaign apparatchik who worked as a field coordinator for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and served as Barbara Boxer’s press secretary, among other things.

So the single most important piece of journalism of 2020, which proves pretty conclusively that one of the two major parties is running for president a man whose son was given a million-dollar board appointment in return for his foreign-policy influence which he’s on video bragging about using, is going to be suppressed on the world’s largest social media network.

Netflix has a documentary out called The Social Dilemma, which is well worth watching as it exposes Facebook for the truly atrocious, manipulative entity it has become.

Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife have donated $250 million to a shady nonprofit for the purpose of paying local elections officials to turn out the vote in heavily Democrat areas.

Facebook has been censoring, fact-checking, shadow-banning, and even jailing its users for spreading “fake news” that isn’t fake at all.

And now they’re openly suppressing a major American newspaper for proving the corruption of Facebook’s favored presidential candidate.

If you haven’t seen The Social Dilemma, you should fix that. And if you’re still on Facebook you need to at least have a plan to get off. This kind of abusive manipulation, which in our Godfather metaphor corresponds to Castro’s gang rolling into Havana in jeeps at the end of The Godfather Part II, ought to be responded to as the Cubans did — by getting the hell out.

The market should kill Facebook before federal regulators and politicians do. But if federal regulators and politicians have to kill it, and one way that ought to be done is to impose a confiscatory tax on the data mining of social media users as suggested in the Netflix documentary, then so be it. We should not have people like Mark Zuckerberg wielding anything like this kind of power over us.

Meanwhile, and least surprising of all, Team Biden called a lid on Wednesday’s campaign events early in the morning.

As for Hunter, or Fredo if you’d rather, don’t look for him to go fishing on a lake anytime soon.

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Scott McKay is publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics. He’s also a novelist — check out his first book “Animus: A Tale of Ardenia,” available in Kindle and paperback.

https://spectator.org/hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-post/