Hunter Biden’s laptop continues to yield damning information that shows his dad, President Joe Biden, played a significant and knowing role in his son’s sleazy influence-peddling. And while the media efforts to pretend these revelations are nothing but “Russian disinformation” have ceased, The Post’s scoops still get ignored by outlets that would be all over them if they were about the Trump family.
The latest, of course, is the photographic evidence that then-Veep Joe attended an April 16, 2015, dinner with shady Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakh “businessmen” and even posed for photos with the unseemly guests.
To put some face-saving cover on the event in the private “Garden Room” at Café Milano, a posh Georgetown eatery (“Where the world’s most powerful people go,” run its promos), Hunter billed it as “ostensibly to discuss food security,” as he e-mailed one guest, and invited several officials from the World Food Program.
But the beards were outnumbered by the likes of corrupt former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov (hubby of Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina, who’d paid one of Hunter’s firms $3.5 million the year before), Kazakh oligarch Kenes Rakishev, Karim Massimov (a former prime minister of Kazakhstan) and Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
The photo of the then-veep and Hunter smiling with the two Kazakhs, clearly shot at Café Milano, isn’t the only proof Joe actually attended the dinner: Pozharskyi e-mailed Hunter the next day, “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.” So much for any claim that Joe never met with Burisma officials even as he was Team Obama’s point man on Ukraine, a role he used to demand the ouster of a prosecutor who was looking into the firm.
Burisma was then paying Hunter (who had zero energy expertise) $83,333 a month to sit on its board. Another e-mail from the laptop reveals that Burisma cut Hunter’s pay in half in March 2017 — right after Joe became a private citizen, another clear sign of what actually qualified the Biden scion for such vast payouts.
Face time with a vice president, and the ability to brag about what you talked about over dinner, is worth a lot to global sleazoids. So are smiling photos that imply a relationship and pull at the highest reaches of US government.
Another sign of Joe’s collusion in Hunter’s unseemly work: The then-veep hired an aide away from one his son’s firms in 2014, and she then proceeded to keep her old bosses informed on visiting dignitaries and official events that might interest them.
Oh, and the Bidens have never themselves denied the laptop was Hunter’s before he abandoned it, nor denied the accuracy of its contents. The president and his camp have simply offered vague assurances that Joe Biden himself never did anything wrong.
Without doubt, if Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner or so on had been caught playing such games, it’d get nonstop coverage on MSNBC, and The Washington Post and The New York Times would have full investigative teams following up for months.
Hunter’s merchandizing of his last name wasn’t even anything new: The Biden family has been trading on Joe Biden’s high offices for decades, making millions off their presumed influence and access. Yet somehow news about it all is never “fit to print,” even though “democracy dies in darkness.”