Commentary
Based on hundreds of news and investigative reports over the past several years, not to mention well-researched books like Peter Schweizer’s “Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite,” Hunter Biden—the second son of Joe Biden—has allegedly been waltzing on the dark side of the law for most of his adult life.
Speculation has long run rife about Hunter’s corrupt business dealings. It was illuminated in Joe Biden’s incriminating video of a speech made in January 2018 to the Council on Foreign Relations. The speech highlighted the pressure he personally placed on then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to remove a Ukrainian prosecutor who may have been investigating corruption potentially linked to his son: “I looked at them [the Ukrainians] and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a [expletive]. [laughter] He got fired.” However, the lid was really blown off Hunter’s various corrupt dealings by The New York Post, in October of 2020, when it broke an influence-peddling operation involving members of the Biden family.
Tucker Carlson picked up on the Post’s laptop disclosure with an interview of Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s former business partner/associate, on October 27, 2020. In that interview, Bobulinski claimed that he was personally vetted by Joe Biden in two separate meetings to run the Bidens’ China business operations, which involved a joint venture called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) between Rosemont Seneca Partners (in which Hunter was a partner) and the Chinese investment firm Bohai Capital. And as reported here and here, Rosemont Seneca subsequently “secured a $1 billion investment from the state-owned Bank of China, which was later expanded to $1.5 billion.”
A Two-Tiered Justice System
With the continuing drip, drip, drip of disclosures and media reports since then, the list of Hunter Biden’s alleged crimes has grown to be rather long, and perhaps the chickens are finally coming home to roost, as a number of recent news stories (see CNN report here) suggest that a grand jury will return indictments against him “soon.” He could be potentially indicted for any number of crimes, as this July 23 article by legal scholar Jonathan Turley for The Hill suggests: lying on a federal form to hide drug use in order to obtain a gun, tax evasion, influence-peddling, money-laundering, and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). However, Turley does not mention the more sensational possible charges, given Hunter’s videos and emails from that laptop that show potential evidence of illegal drug use, child pornography, and links to prostitution and/or human trafficking rings.It is not a stretch of the imagination to discern that there appears to be a two-tiered justice system at play here. Any regular American with similar evidence that has been compiled, on the public record, through news reports would have been charged, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced long ago. Imagine the feeding frenzy if Donald Trump, Jr., had been involved in any similar activities!
Hunter Biden walks to Marine One on the Ellipse outside the White House in Washington on May 22, 2021. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
In Hunter Biden’s case, it is quite obvious that his familial connections to a top U.S. politician—and now sitting president—have long shielded him from prosecution. FARA prosecutions have become politically motivated and rare. Money laundering has become an art form for which very few in the political class are prosecuted. And influence-peddling has been virtually legalized over time by the Supreme Court, as noted here, to the point that anti-corruption laws have opened the doors for the behavior of the Bidens and other members of the U.S. political class.
There are lots of loopholes and workarounds to avoid federal rules and regulations, too. Take, for example, those associated with monitoring and reporting financial transactions for potential illegality. And while Turley alluded to money laundering in his article above, he did not go into details. Let us examine the issue further.
Avoiding Unwanted Scrutiny
The Treasury Department operates the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), whose mission is “to safeguard the financial system from illicit use, combat money laundering and its related crimes including terrorism, and promote national security through the strategic use of financial authorities and the collection, analysis, and dissemination of financial intelligence.” The FinCEN enforces the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which was originally passed “to prevent financial institutions from being used as tools by criminals to hide or launder their ill-gotten gains.”The FinCEN uses two tools to track large and/or suspicious financial transactions: the Currency Transaction Report (CTR), and the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR). CTRs are standard reports by banks and other financial institutions that are filed for all transactions over $10,000. SARs are filed when banks and other financial institutions have a reason to suspect suspicious activity associated with a given account. Receipt of a SAR initiates an investigation by the FinCEN, with the goal of identifying bank customers who are involved in money laundering, fraud, or terrorist funding.
Automatic CTRs can of course be avoided by limiting one’s transactions to under $10,000. And unscrupulous overseas banks can be found that look the other way and do not send SARs to the Treasury Department, in order to profit from similarly unscrupulous account holders. Then there are the overseas tax havens that provide legal cover for sheltering large sums of money. In 2016, a window into that world was provided by the so-called Panama Papers, that is, the 11.5 million leaked encrypted confidential documents that exposed around 214,000 tax havens, involving people from nearly 200 different countries, including the United States.
In summary, money-laundering through overseas banks to overseas tax havens is a standard way that influence-peddlers and criminals hide money from the IRS. And simply under-reporting financial transactions below the threshold reporting requirement of $10,000 can be a way to avoid unwanted scrutiny by the FinCEN.
Hunter’s Suspicious Transactions
When Hunter Biden was on retainer as a member of Ukrainian gas conglomerate Burisma Holdings’ board of directors, an April 2014 bank transaction was recorded (pdf) between Privat Bank (Ukraine/Burisma) and Morgan-Stanley, an investment bank focusing on “capital investments and wealth management” that handled Rosemont Seneca (Hunter Biden’s company). The Morgan Stanley statement highlights his monthly $83,333 retainer fee from Burisma Holdings. Also in April, a bank transaction record shows over $3,000,000 received by Morgan Stanley on behalf of Rosemont Seneca from Germany’s Deutsche Bank. Could that large sum have been part of “a $3.5 million payment [to Hunter Biden in February 2014] from the wealthy wife of Moscow’s former mayor,” as reported by Newsweek in September of 2020?Hunter Biden has also been linked to financial transactions with Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, and Chinese nationals, as previously reported here by the Daily Caller. Are there other SARs and financial transactions associated with Rosemont Seneca and other Biden family enterprises that are being examined by the FinCEN as part of that grand jury investigation?
It would be instructive to see the complete set of financial transactions associated with Rosemont Seneca, as well as all monies received by Hunter Biden from foreign sources over the last dozen or so years. Perhaps the complexity of reviewing these records is why the grand jury process has taken so long to determine whether probable cause exists to indict Hunter.
Concluding Thoughts
Hunter Biden is a poster child for influence-peddling and skirting accountability for corrupt actions under the law. Email, video, and photographic records from his laptop that have leaked into the public domain incriminate him in a wide range of potential criminal activities. That he has not been prosecuted for anything at this point is itself an indictment on our criminal justice system.The latest is that the grand jury investigating Biden “has been disbanded,” according to a Fox News report on July 21. Reports that an indictment is imminent over Burisma, Rosemont Seneca, videos of him smoking crack cocaine, child pornography files on his laptop, a falsely filed gun background check, and other evidence already in the public record, are apparently being dropped down the memory hole with no further action forthcoming.
It pays handsomely to be the offspring of a U.S. president.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
