Hunter Biden confirmed Post scoop on dad Joe’s dinner with biz pals, deposition transcript shows
WASHINGTON — First son Hunter Biden confirmed some of the core facts in the impeachment case against his father — including that Joe Biden attended dinners with his son’s foreign patrons while vice president — in closed-door impeachment testimony released Thursday.
The 54-year-old verified during his daylong Wednesday deposition before two House committees that there were two dinners at DC’s Cafe Milano restaurant in 2014 and 2015 where Joe Biden mixed with Hunter’s Kazakhstani, Russian and Ukrainian benefactors.
Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, which paid Hunter a $1 million annual salary beginning in 2014 as his father spearheaded US policy toward Kyiv, attended, Hunter acknowledged to the panels investigating his dad for alleged corruption.
“I do believe that Vadym was at one of these dinners, yes,” he said, backing The Post’s initial October 2020 reporting on documents from Hunter’s abandoned laptop, which revealed a thank-you note from Pozharskyi one day after the April 16, 2015, get-together.
Joe Biden’s presidential campaign disputed the report at the time, claiming no such encounter was on Joe Biden’s “official schedules.”
Hunter confirmed the dinners also included Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina, who reportedly transferred $3.5 million on Feb. 14, 2014, to a company jointly owned by Hunter and business partner Devon Archer, and Kazakhstani businessman Kenes Rakishev, who purchased Hunter a $142,000 sports car.
“My dad did not come for dinner … I believe that he probably had a Coca-Cola and a bowl of spaghetti,” he said of one of the Cafe Milano gatherings — though other witnesses have described Joe Biden as having a full meal while in attendance.
Hunter said that he believes the first oligarch dinner was on his birthday on Feb. 4, 2014, and that “my dad stopped by because it was my actual birthday.” The 2015 meal was ostensibly a fundraiser for an international charity.
The first son did not clarify which oligarchs attended which dinners, saying “I don’t remember exactly who was there because it’s sometimes conflated.”
The date of the 2014 dinner, however, raises the prospect that Baturina may have transferred the as-yet unexplained $3.5 million just 10 days after mingling with the elder Biden.
The oligarch dinner in 2014 was revealed last year by Archer, who did not know the date and said he didn’t know the reason for the Baturina’s $3.5 million transfer.
“I don’t think I ever introduced him [Joe Biden] to her [Baturina]. I think that she was also at a dinner over the course of the time in which Devon was engaged with Yelena Baturina,” Hunter said in his deposition.
Hunter testified “I never received a dime from Ms. Baturina,” who has thus far avoided his father’s sanctions against Russia’s business elite over the two-year Kremlin invasion of Ukraine.
House Republicans have not established the precise flow of the $3.5 million, but say that $2.75 million was transferred to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, which Archer said was controlled on a 50-50 basis by himself and Hunter Biden.
Baturina separately invested more than $100 million with Archer’s Rosemont Realty, with which Hunter Biden also was briefly associated.
FOGGY MEMORY ON CHINA, LAPTOP
But the scandal-plagued first son refused to confirm, citing his lack of memory, other significant details — including about dealings with Chinese companies — and he would not say that the infamous laptop was forgotten by him at a Delaware shop in 2019.
Hunter described himself as a “high-functioning addict” who in moments of clarity was able to perform business functions while abusing alcohol and crack cocaine.
“In 2019, did you drop your laptop off at a repair shop?” asked Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).
“Not that I remember, no,” said Hunter, who in 2021 conceded the device “certainly” could be his, but that it might have been stolen, hacked or planted by Russian intelligence.
Hunter Biden similarly claimed he could not remember his father’s alleged attendance at an early 2017 lunch with Chinese state-linked CEFC China Energy’s chairman Ye Jianming.
“I do not recall introducing my father to Ye Jianming,” Hunter testified.
The first son’s former business associate Rob Walker said in his own testimony on Jan. 26 that the Joe Biden-Ye meeting at a DC hotel preceded the flow of an initial $3 million to a group of Biden family partners, of which more than a third went to Hunter and first brother James Biden.
Walker testified that the funds, transferred weeks after Biden left office as vice president, were a “thank you” for preliminary work scouting business opportunities while Biden still held office.
“I do not contest or would question if Rob has a memory. I do not have a memory of the date of that,” the first son maintained of the lunch allegedly featuring his dad and Ye, who has since gone missing in China amid corruption allegations there.
A May 2017 email recovered from Hunter’s laptop described a proposed 10% cut for Joe Biden — identified as the “big guy” — as part of a proposed joint venture with CEFC. The author of that email, Biden family associate James Gilliar, has not yet testified in the impeachment inquiry.
Hunter said that he could not recall the planned slice for his dad.
“If I had seen [the email], I’m certain that what I would have done is I would have picked up the phone and said, ‘You’re out of your mind’,” Hunter testified.
“And I literally probably didn’t know what he was talking about, because, number one, if you look at it, the percentages were all wrong to begin with. The percentages were wrong in that I would never go into a business partnership with my uncle in which I got 20% and my uncle got 10%. He would be my partner in it. That’s number one.”
Another $5.1 million allegedly was transferred by CEFC to Hunter and his uncle James within 10 days of a threatening WhatsApp message to a Chinese associate in July 2017 that warned he was “sitting here with my father.”
The first son testified that “I was drunk and probably high” when he wrote the message and that he mistakenly sent it to Henry Zhao, who was associated with an existing Chinese venture, rather than the intended Raymond Zhao of CEFC.
“The next day, I speak to a Raymond Zhao, who has never received the message that Henry Zhao got,” he said.
Hunter did push back on Archer’s testimony that Joe Biden had coffee in December 2013 with his business partner, incoming CEO Jonathan Li of Chinese state-backed BHR Partners, which like CEFC sought out foreign resources for China, such as cobalt for electric car batteries.
Hunter joined his dad aboard Air Force Two for the trip to Beijing where Joe Biden met Li and BHR was registered within two weeks of the visit, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“There was a rope line, and Jonathan Li was in the lobby of the hotel where I was going to meet him for coffee,” Hunter said. “In that line I introduced my dad to Jonathan Li and a friend of his, and they shook hands and I believe probably took a photograph. And then my father went up to his room, and I went to have coffee with Jonathan Li.”
Hunter said he didn’t know who Li’s friend was.
Joe Biden later wrote college recommendation letters for Li’s children and allegedly greeted him on speaker phone during a subsequent Hunter Biden visit to China, Archer testified July 31.
At one point, Hunter insisted that his dealings were ethical, claiming under oath that “I’ve never received money from a foreign government” — despite his lucrative dealings with the two Chinese state-controlled ventures.
Many significant business associations were not discussed at length in the transcript, including Hunter’s windfall from Romania and pursuit of business in Mexico during his dad’s vice presidency.
Hunter maintained that his 81-year-old father was not corrupt and that his own abuse of alcohol and drugs were to blame for many of the appearances to the contrary.
“The pattern that I see is that you literally have no evidence whatsoever of any corruption on the part of my father,” Hunter said during a heated exchange with Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas).
“And, therefore, what you’re trying to do is, you’re trying to make every single thing in business that I was ever involved in somehow corrupt.”
The transcript, spanning more than 200 pages, was released by agreement between Hunter’s legal team and House Democrats and Republicans.
It’s possible the first son will return for a public hearing, where many of his claims would again be vetted.
Democrats said Wednesday that Republicans had failed to make their case and should shut down the inquiry.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said that the GOP ought to “fold up the circus tent.”
But Republicans said Thursday that the probe will continue.
“Jamie Raskin is a rascal. It is amazing to me the hypocrisy he is showing right now with the things he said about Donald Trump,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) told The Post in an interview.
“Clearly there is some level of corruption here and where it leads, we’ll have to see,” Emmer said.
“We all know there’s corruption here. And the issue is peddling influence around the world. Whether or not that rises to the level [of impeachment], I don’t know. Our guys are going to have to go through the process.”
