I think it is unfortunate that the phrase “Hunter Biden’s laptop” is generally used to refer to the documents demonstrating Joe Biden’s corruption that happened to be discovered on that device. What is relevant is the documents and what they show, not a particular device where they were housed. It is somewhat as though the Pentagon Papers had been referred to as “Ellsberg’s three-ring binder.”
Documents on the Biden family’s corrupt dealings continue to trickle out, including these, which show obligations of Hunter Biden that, in January 2019, Joe Biden undertook to pay “in the short term.” Click to enlarge:
This summary indicates that Hunter was paying his ex-wife $37,000 a month. They show that as of January 2019, he still had not paid his 2015 taxes, or portions, at least, of taxes due for 2016 and 2017. The email from Katie Dodge and the attached documents reflect that Hunter Biden’s finances were a mess. He couldn’t pay his bills, including old tax obligations. The influence peddling that we now know went on had little to do with Hunter Biden: he had no influence to peddle. It was Joe Biden who had a position to sell.
Perhaps most interesting of these bills is the fact that Hunter owed over $130,000 to the law firm Faegre Baker Daniels. Over $28,000 of that amount was for restructuring BHR. BHR is Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Company, one of the Chinese entities in which Hunter (and perhaps Joe) had an interest. MSN reports:
An investment firm founded by Hunter Biden assisted a Chinese company in purchasing one of the world’s richest cobalt mines from an American company for $3.8 billion – helping the conglomerate gain a massive share of the key metal used to make electric car batteries.
The president’s son was one of three Americans who joined Chinese partners in establishing the Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Company, or BHR, in 2013.
The Americans controlled 30 percent of the company and made successful investments that culminated in aiding China Molybdenum purchase the Tenke Fungurume cobalt mine in the Congo from the American company Freeport-McMoRan in 2016, the New York Times reported.
The largest Faegre bill, over $82,000, was for a “Confidential Investi[gation].” It would be interesting to know what confidential investigation was worth $82,000 to Hunter Biden–a bill that Joe Biden apparently paid “ASAP.”
I spent my entire legal career at Faegre & Benson; I believe I was lawyer number 70 when I started in 1974. Today, after two mergers, the firm Faegre Drinker has over 1,300 lawyers worldwide. I suppose it comes as a surprise to almost all of those 1,300 that Hunter Biden has been a client of the firm.
UPDATE: Last summer, a long series of texts between Hunter Biden and a partner in my former law firm became public. The lawyer appears to be a friend of Biden and something of a jack of all trades, working on Biden’s divorce obligations as well as other legal and personal issues. When these texts first emerged, attention focused on Biden’s use of the N-word, but they seem to me to have interest much beyond that:
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