Today, Explained - Let’s talk about Hunter Biden

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

Hunter Biden may not be the archcriminal that conservatives describe, but his actions present problems for his father (the president of the United States). Vox's Andrew Prokop explains. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and edited by Sean Rameswaram, who also hosted. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ahead on Today Explained. Son. Father. Brother. Failure. Criminal. Hunter. Biden.

Our next guest is probably the most famous board member of a Ukrainian energy company of all time. The Department of Justice investigation of Hunter Biden is heating up. Several recent reports suggest that a grand jury in the state of Delaware is hearing evidence brought by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Delaware. And they are making a case for potential criminal indictment of Hunter Biden. On the show today, we're going to figure out how this might affect Hunter himself, but also his very famous father, a.k.a. the President of the United States. I don't know what he was doing. I know he was on the board.

I found out he was on the board after he was on the board. And that was it. I'm Sean Ramos for him. That's Ahead on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started.

Today, today explained. Andrew Prokop, Vox, Hunter Biden has been an ancillary figure in many a conversation you and I have had on this program in the past. You know, Hunter Biden, I don't think anyone has looked at the situation of his work in Ukraine and said, this is perfectly above board and there's nothing at all queasy about this. It does look weird. But today, he's the main character of our story. For all those who aren't familiar, what's his deal? So Hunter is Joe Biden's second son. He has been called the black sheep of the Biden family, a ne'er-do-well.

He's struggled with drug addiction in a very high-profile way. I went one time for 13 days without sleeping and smoking crack and drinking vodka exclusively throughout that entire time. He was discharged from the Naval Reserve. Hunter failing a drug test one month after receiving his commission, testing positive for cocaine, and discharged less than honorably. His personal life took a very tumultuous turns after his older brother, Beau Biden, suddenly died of brain cancer in 2015. After that, Hunter split from his own wife. She writes in the divorce documents, and this is a quote,

his recent conduct creates situations that are unsafe or traumatic for the party's children, and his judgment is frequently impaired. And began dating Beau's widow. We were together and trying to do the right thing. And that grief turned into a hope for a love that maybe could replace what we lost. Until that relationship collapsed too. Hunter's now ex-wife accused him in a court filing of spending extravagantly on drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women

with whom he has had sexual relations. And Hunter also fathered a child with a different woman in this period who later sued him for paternity. He repeatedly went in and out of rehab. He was really a mess in this period who later sued him for paternity. He repeatedly went in and out of rehab. He was really a mess in this period. You would wake up and be looking for crack and just smoke whatever was there? Yeah, you know, I spent more time on my hands and knees

picking through rugs, smoking anything that even remotely resembled crack cocaine. He has been kind of in the swampy Washington lobbying influence sector for decades now. And he started at this back when his father was a senator from Delaware, continued on when Joe Biden became vice president in the Obama administration. And he's been at the center of many political scandals as well. Let's talk more about those. How does Hunter Biden become a controversial political figure? So the criticisms about what exactly Hunter Biden is doing to make money date back to the 1990s. So he at this stage was about 26 years old.

He just graduated Yale Law School and he took a job at MBNA Bank, which was his father's largest campaign donor at the time. He continued to work as a lobbyist in the 2000s, basically being in the business of being Senator Joe Biden's son, helping clients get stuff through Congress, get earmarks and so on. Then Senator Joe Biden became Vice President Joe Biden and got a much bigger role in Washington and greater fame. And Hunter Biden expanded his ambitions as well. He moved from lobbying to the more opaque world of shadowy consulting or investment work for foreign clients. And there was big money associated with this work. He has had many clients in this period, the most famous of which is the Ukrainian gas company Burisma that gave Hunter Biden a board seat.

Hunter Biden reportedly made $50,000 a month to sit on the board of a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma. At the time, his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, was the Obama administration's point person on Ukraine. When Hunter didn't really seem to have much knowledge of the energy sector or experience with it or anything like that. If your last name wasn't Biden, do you think you would have been asked to be on the board of ARIZMA?

I don't know. I don't know. Probably not. I don't think that there's a lot of things that would have happened in my life that if my last name wasn't Biden. It just seems to be an attempt to do favors for Joe Biden's family and that Hunter is basically in the business of being Joe Biden's son. He's also had Chinese clients, Kazakh clients, and other clients as well.

Hunter Biden and James Biden served as the perfect vehicle by which the communist Chinese government could gain inroads here in the United States. In just one brief 14-month period from 2017 to 2018, a Chinese energy company sent $4.8 million to entities that Hunter and his uncle James Biden controlled for purported legal and advisory work. Hmm. James Biden being the brother of Joe. Yes, exactly. Now, all of this is certainly less than ideal for President Biden, but it doesn't necessarily

sound totally illegal, right? There is nothing inherently illegal about accepting money and gifts from foreign interests if you are a private citizen, which Hunter Biden was, and your dad is a famous and powerful person, as Joe Biden was. It's just, you know, Hunter is not his dad, and he can go into business however he wants. But there are obviously ethical concerns about, you know, potential clients of interest, questions that conservative critics have raised about whether Joe Biden is really, as he claims, completely uninterested in Hunter's foreign work or who his clients happen to be. I don't know what he was doing. I know he was on the board. I found out he was on the board after he was on the board. And that was it. And there's nobody.

Well, you've had a lot of time. Isn't this something you want to get to the bottom of? No, because I trust my son. And just, you know, the question of whether this is a somewhat shady way to make money if your dad is now the president of the United States. Totally fair. Tax time is here. I got to ask, does Hunter Biden file on time and file truthfully? We don't have full visibility into Hunter Biden's taxes just yet, but that appears to be what launched this whole investigation. It started, according to the New York Times, as a tax inquiry back during the Obama administration,

looking into whether Hunter had properly paid his taxes on all the money he was making. And then in 2018, the investigation broadened and became a criminal investigation looking into Hunter for potential violations of tax laws, money laundering laws, and whether he acted as an unregistered foreign agent for these foreign clients. And Hunter actually just coughed up a more than a million dollars payment to settle a tax liability he had just last year, according to the Times. So that seems to be a concession that perhaps his tax affairs were not fully in order until just recently, at least. And if I recall correctly, the attention on Hunter Biden's personal finances increases dramatically once the former president's in office.

Yes, Hunter Biden was, you know, he would pop up in the tabloids sometimes. He would be a minor headache for the Obama administration. But where he really becomes a focus of the right is when Joe Biden is gearing up to challenge Donald Trump in 2020. Donald Trump is worried about running against Joe Biden. He thinks that Biden will be his strongest opponent. You can tell he's really scared. And he and his allies become fixated on looking for the thing that will bring Joe Biden down. Every time Joe Biden was named point man, the Biden family made millions.

And they start closely scrutinizing Hunter Biden. Ukraine, point man, the kid makes $8 million. Specifically, Rudy Giuliani, Trump's lawyer, hears from some associates of his that there may have been something shady about Hunter's Ukraine work for the company Burisma, they claim. Burisma Holding Limited and its director, Hunter Biden, are involved in corruption affair. And then it lays out a stone cold money laundering situation that he was involved in for $14.6 million. They said that they had heard that Joe Biden, while he was vice president, had helped get the top prosecutor in Ukraine fired. Joe Biden willing to fire the prosecutor by threatening the Ukrainian government with millions of dollars in aid if they don't get rid of the guy investigating his son. A billion.

Give me a break, Sean. Now, this was never corroborated or proven in any way. And in fact, it doesn't seem to hold up to the facts at all. This was a United States policy to push out this prosecutor general. It wasn't anything limited to or specific to Joe Biden. There were various reasons to push him out. They thought he wasn't prosecuting enough corruption. But Trump became obsessed that, you know, this would prove Joe Biden's corruption.

And that is when he had his famous phone call with Ukraine's, at the time, new president, Volodymyr Zelensky. A just-released transcript of a phone call shows President Trump asking Ukrainian President Zelensky to investigate his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. And in this call, the president repeatedly stresses how much the U.S. does for Ukraine. And then he says, quote, I would like you to do us a favor. That, of course, started a chain of events that led to Donald Trump's first impeachment when all of this became public and it looked like he was shaking down a foreign leader for his own political advantage. But the whole impeachment thing is not the end of the former

president's obsession with Joe Biden's son. Oh, no. So this investigation, we should mention, is proceeding in the background of the Justice Department at this point, but it is not public and no one knows about it. Meanwhile, Trump's allies are continuing to try and dig up more dirt about him. And eventually, Rudy Giuliani's own team hears a curious tale. A guy who owns a computer repair store in the state of Delaware says that there were three laptops that were water damaged and abandoned at his store in 2019. The person who dropped them off never came back to pick them up, and he left a receipt and signed the name Hunter Biden. One of the laptops had a Beau Biden Foundation sticker on it. And so the computer store owner, who just happens to be a huge fan of Donald Trump, starts looking at what's on these laptops.

What's the data that he can find? And he sees some stuff that he thinks looks pretty scandalous. So he called the FBI and he gave them the laptop. But he copied all the information, kept it for himself, and then had it sent over to Rudy Giuliani. And that is how the story of Hunter Biden's laptop became public. What do they find on these laptops again? So there's all sorts of embarrassing stuff, sex videos, personal emails about Hunter's relationships, his struggles with drug addiction, very private exchanges with family members, with people close to him.

And then there is a whole lot of material about his business work as well, emails related to his work for foreign clients. And one that got particularly a lot of attention was an email that mentioned something about the big guy. The big guy? The big guy. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting

so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained ramp.com slash explained r a m p.com slash explained cards issued by sutton bank member fdic terms and conditions apply bet mgm authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM.

And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM. A sportsbook worth a slam dunk. An authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com

for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or The Big Guy. The Big Guy? The Big Guy. Operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. The big guy. The big guy? The big guy. Andrew Brokaw, Fox, we're talking about Hunter Biden. We're talking about his laptops.

We're talking about emails he sent that spoke of the big guy. Is the big guy his old man, the president of the United States? So this email here that mentions the big guy, it was sent in May 2017 by one of Hunter's business associates. At this point, Hunter was trying to strike a deal with a Chinese energy company for a joint venture that would focus in the United States. And they had a proposed share split, an equity split for this joint venture. And the email goes down the list of who would get what percentage of the shares.

So it starts with 20H, and H apparently means Hunter. Then there's 20 each for three more of Hunter's business partners. They're listed by initials. 10 Jim, which is apparently James Biden. And then it says 10 held by H for the big guy question mark. And so one of these would-be business associates, they didn't end up actually striking this deal.

Nothing went forward. But this person came forward. Tony Bobulinski is his name at the height of the 2020 campaign. And he alleged that the big guy meant Joe Biden, that Hunter was going to hold these shares secretly for his father. And Joe Biden, we should mention, has totally denied this and said there's absolutely nothing to this. President Biden has never considered being in business with his family or any business overseas. And again, this business venture never happened. So this joint venture did not come together. This equity split ended up being totally theoretical.

And there is no evidence that Joe even knew what Hunter's business partners were talking about here. So, you know, the big guy email doesn't necessarily look so great, but it doesn't seem to have led to anything either. So it doesn't sound like much of this is going to touch the president of the United States directly. Is that fair? We never know what we don't know, of course, but we actually do know a fair amount about this criminal investigation because Trump's allies have had these emails from the laptop for some time. They have had all of this private info of Hunter Biden's and they have not been able to really make a scandal stick to Joe Biden. The closest they've got is that Joe Biden gave a really sweeping denial about how he's never spoken to his son about business ever. And it does seem like Hunter has, for instance, brought his business clients to briefly meet Joe Biden

at events. He had them all at a dinner in 2015 while Biden was vice president. There are other sorts of events like that. But the laptop did not at all vindicate Trump's allies' claims that Vice President Joe Biden secretly fired the Ukrainian prosecutor general to cover up his son's company's corruption or anything like that. And the question of what happened with this Chinese energy company, the company did end up paying Hunter and his uncle James, entities that they controlled, nearly $5 million. But there's been no evidence that any of that money made it to Joe Biden, that Joe Biden was aware of that or anything like that. How strong is the case at this point against Hunter Biden? So we don't totally know. Again, it focuses on three main areas. The first is taxes. And

prosecutors are, according to the Wall Street Journal, examining whether Hunter, quote, moved funds in a way to obscure his tax liability. So the second area is money laundering. And, you know, money laundering sounds like big and scary. It sounds like drug trafficking or something like that. But it's also just a charge that prosecutors can connect to much more prosaic crimes because it really just means bringing money into the U.S. financial system in connection with some sort of crime. So the crime that prosecutors seem to be

looking at here is whether the money laundering was in connection to the crime of Hunter working as an unregistered foreign agent. So that's number three, crime number three in this investigation. So, you know, is all this sufficient to support a criminal charge for being an unregistered foreign agent? That's not clear. And according to The New York Times, prosecutors have considered pursuing this as a civil matter instead, not a criminal one. So it's not a sure thing that this will end up being charged criminally. It's not clear the case is strong enough for that. It's not clear Hunter's conduct merited that. So this all could just end up like a big nothing burger at some point?

At a certain point, the prosecutors are going to have to decide whether they want to indict him. They've been building a case against him. They've been bringing all these witnesses in front of this grand jury in hopes, I believe, of making this case. But eventually they will have to decide, you know, do we have the goods? Are we likely to win a conviction? Does this justify bringing charges? And they could certainly decide either way on that in the end. In the meantime, it seems like people on the right love to throw

around Hunter Biden's name in order to somehow impinge upon his father's reputation. Is that sort of the strategy here? Yes, they enjoy doing that very much. And not just his father. There is deep-seated grievances on the right about how this whole Hunter Biden issue has been covered dating back years. Covered by whom? Covered by you? I mean, I am always totally fair and no one has any objections to my coverage ever. But, you know, it's never really been a convenient time for Democrats to have this discussion about Hunter Biden. When Trump was in office, Democrats argued that, oh, of course, Trump's conduct was far worse on so many fronts. I mean, he tried to steal the election for crying out loud. And now Trump's

out of office and Joe Biden's in office. And, you know, there are still arguments about why this is not the most important story in the world. And, you know, there are still arguments about why this is not the most important story in the world. And it's not the most important story in the world. Hunter is not a public official. He's the son of the president. He may be facing financial or lobbying related charges. But if the case doesn't go anywhere further than that, then it is kind of a story limited to himself while also perhaps telling a larger story about how Washington functions. Really, his behavior is kind of a classic story of the Washington swamp. He was clearly in the business of being Joe Biden's son, trying to cash in on that and got these foreign interests to pay him large amounts of money for that. Andrew Prokop, he's a senior correspondent at Vox. You can read his writing on Hunter at Vox.com.

Our show today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi, engineered by Afim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and edited by me. Give me a break, Sean. I'm Sean Ramos for him. It's Today Explained. you