December 21, 2022

BECAUSE PETER HATES MEXICANS:

'Tis the Season to Debunk Your Family's Hunter Biden Conspiracy Theories (Molly Olmstead, Dec. 21st, 2022, Slate)

OK, so why does my cousin Peter talk about the Hunter Biden emails as if they're so damning?

In a 2017 email that was uncovered in the laptop dump, a business associate of Hunter's used the phrase "10 held by H for the big guy?" in an email about a partnership that Hunter and his uncle Jim Biden were forming with a Chinese energy conglomerate called CEFC China Energy.

One of the partners in the deal, Anthony Bobulinski, has said that "H" was Hunter and the "big guy" was Joe Biden. That wouldn't be great--a former vice president (and future president) getting in on a business deal with a Chinese energy company! Except there's no real evidence that he did: The draft agreement that circulated afterward did not mention Joe Biden; nor did the signed company agreement. Other business associates have said Joe Biden was not involved in the discussions.

The second allegedly incriminating email was called the "smoking-gun email" by the New York Post. In an April 2015 message, a Burisma executive thanked Hunter for "giving an opportunity to meet your father," reportedly at a dinner that had taken place the previous day. This exchange occurred before the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor, so it excited Trumpworld because it appeared to prove that Joe Biden had lied when he said during the 2020 presidential campaign that he hadn't known about Hunter's work in Ukraine. But we don't know for sure that the Burisma exec actually did attend the dinner, which took place at Cafe Milano in D.C. and was attended by about a dozen people. (He wasn't on the guest list.) Nor do we know how long Joe Biden was there. (At least one person has said the vice president only stopped by briefly to visit with a leader in the Greek Orthodox Church.) So it doesn't necessarily mean that Joe Biden and the Burisma executive had a one-on-one conversation or that Burisma was discussed at all. In any case, whether or not Joe Biden spoke to the executive, a Republican-led Senate investigation into the Bidens' Ukraine activities found no evidence that Joe Biden took any actions that might have benefited his son.

Posted by at December 21, 2022 12:00 AM

  

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