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 spike? Let’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)
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.
