The White House can’t just wash away the stink of Hunter Biden’s laptop

"The New York Times broke its silence last week, and admitted the laptop is real. The
Washington Post also woke from its slumber and has begun investigating the laptop, recently phoning sources The Post interviewed long ago.

 

And, as a grand jury in Delaware moves closer to potentially indicting Hunter, 52, over alleged tax evasion, money laundering and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, pressure is mounting on the president finally to explain his role in the international influence-peddling scheme run by his son and brother, Jim Biden, while he was vice president.

 

Evidence also exists showing that Joe Biden financially benefited from his then-drug-addicted son’s overseas business dealings — perhaps by several million dollars.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki played dumb last week and refused to answer questions from The Post’s Steven Nelson about how the president is navigating conflicts of interest during the Ukraine-Russia war when it comes to sanctioning people who have done business with his family.

Specifically, Nelson asked about Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, who has not been sanctioned, but who allegedly wired $3.5 million on Feb. 14, 2014, to a firm associated with Hunter’s former business partner, Devon Archer. That wire was flagged in a suspicious activity report provided by the Treasury Department to a Senate Republican inquiry, chaired by Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson.

Now, new evidence has emerged via the laptop showing that Baturina wired as much as $118 million to various offshoots of Rosemont Seneca Partners, the consulting firm co-founded by Hunter, Archer and John Kerry’s stepson, Chris Heinz.

 

Most of the money is believed to have been used to buy properties in Brooklyn and Chelsea for Baturina, as well as shares in commercial office buildings across the country.

Baturina, the wife of the former corrupt mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, was living in exile in London at the time after her husband fell out with the Kremlin. Perhaps this is why she has not been sanctioned by the Biden administration, although Vladimir Putin was photographed sitting beside her and hugging her at her husband’s 2019 funeral in Moscow.

Biden, as vice president, met Baturina on April 16, 2015, at a small dinner organized by Hunter in a private room of the Georgetown restaurant Café Milano. Also on the guest list were Hunter’s Ukrainian paymaster, Vadym Pozharskyi, and Kazakhstan’s then-Prime Minister Karim Massimov, now in jail on treason, and his associate, oligarch Kenes Rakishev.

 

VP Biden also is believed to have attended a second “investor dinner” organized by his son at the end of March 2016, during another visit to DC by Pozharskyi, an executive of the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was paying Hunter $83,333 a month at the time.

Pozharskyi was in DC on March 30 and 31, 2016, the calendar in Hunter’s abandoned laptop shows.

 

Pozharskyi’s visit coincided with the ousting on March 29, 2016, of Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who had been investigating Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, the exiled energy minister of the former Russia-aligned government.

The month before he was removed from office, Shokin issued warrants for Zlochevsky’s arrest and seized all his “movable and immovable property,” including four houses, two plots of land and a Rolls-Royce Phantom, reported the Kyiv Post and Interfax-Ukraine.

Two weeks later, Shokin was fired by then-President Petro Poroshenko, although it took a month for parliament to ratify the decision." NYP