The Hunter Biden scandal is not only about the former vice president’s son getting rich, and matters of national security and foreign policy, it’s about the “enrichment” of Joe Biden himself, contends investigative reporter Peter Schweizer.
Schweizer, who has reported on Biden family influence peddling for several years, said Thursday that emails and text messages from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and other sources make it clear “he’s also paying a lot of the family’s bills, including his father’s and his mother’s, with these foreign gains.”
“This is an issue of enrichment involving Joe Biden himself,” he said in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
Messages between Hunter Biden’s business partners, he said, show “how the Biden family actually operates in this commercial space.”
Schweizer said Joe Biden is trying to distance himself from his son’s business deals, but “that’s just not simply how the family has operated.”
“And that needs to remain front and center as we look to a Biden administration ahead.”
Hannity noted that emails — including one indicating Joe Biden was to get a cut of a China deal — and the testimony of former business partners such as Tony Bobulinski shows there’s “no way” the former vice president didn’t know about his son’s influence peddling.
And he recalled Joe Biden boasting, on video, he threatened to withhold U.S. aid if Ukraine’s president didn’t fire the country’s top prosecutor, who was probing the natural gas firm paying his some 83,000 a month.
“They were using the tools of the vice presidency to get this deals,” Schweizer affirmed.
He noted that Hunter Biden joined his father on Air Force Two to Beijing where the younger Biden struck a deal with a state-controlled Chinese bank worth $1.5 billion.
“You don’t think that on the 20-hour flight that father and son didn’t have a conversation about what Hunter was doing there?” he asked. “And that when Hunter introduced him to his Chinese business partner on that trip there were no questions asked? Of course there were.”
Schweizer pointed to Joe Biden’s many statements over the years of how close the family is and how Hunter is “the heartbeat of the family,” arguing you can’t “pretend that these commercial deals are never discussed, there’s no conversation, there’s no interaction.”
“So, that’s where I think the reporting needs to go next,” he said.
See the interview:
Meanwhile, after Biden told late-night host Stephen Colbert he has “confidence” in his son, calling him “the smartest man I know,” the Biden transition team on Friday was asked no questions from journalists about Hunter Biden in its weekly briefing, Fox News reported.
Ignoring questions from Fox News and others, Biden officials called on only five reporters, from the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, PBS and Politico.
Last week, the Biden transition team issued a statement from Hunter Biden acknowledged his taxes were under investigation by the U.S. Attorney in Delaware.
Joe Biden, in the interview with Colbert, said Republicans and others pressing the issue are engaging in “foul play.”
“I have, we have, great confidence in our son,” Biden said on the CBS program “The Late Show.” “I am not concerned about any accusations being made against him. It’s used to get to me. I think it’s kind of foul play.
“But look, it is what it is,” Biden continued, “and he’s a grown man, he is the smartest man I know. I mean, from a pure intellectual capacity – and as long as he’s good, we’re good.”
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