Joe Biden was “central in his family’s moneymaking scheme” according to the year-long congressional investigation led by James Comer, who claims he found nearly $30 million funneled into the first family’s accounts.
In his new book the Republican Rep. from Kentucky details how Biden’s son Hunter and brother Jim peddled the “Biden Brand” to foreign governments and entrepreneurs in order to rake in cash.
“I can honestly say that I do not know of one single legitimate business that the Bidens owned or operated,” Comer writes in “All the President’s Money: Investigating the Secret Foreign Schemes that Made the Biden Family Rich,” out Jan. 14.
The book also details the many suspicious roadblocks Comer’s Committee on Oversight and Government Accountability hit along the way.
Those obstacles included everything from battling the ranking Democrats on the committee, who tried to discredit the evidence Comer was finding, to the Washington press corps and intelligence community.
Comer, the committee’s chairman, likened DC journalists to “public relations flacks and ad-men for the Democratic Party.”
He accuses bureaucrats at the IRS and FBI, among others, of “slow-walking investigations” and leaking “false narratives” of his findings to the media.
Comer requested more than 200 documents from the administration during the first two years of Biden’s presidency, and “did not receive a single response,” he writes.
When he tried to access the Biden family’s banking records at the beginning of his probe, he was reduced to begging the Department of the Treasury to hand them over.
Initial research showed there were dozens of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed by at least six banks that dealt with first son Hunter’s transactions.
SARs are forms filled out by banks when they detect abnormal transactions which may violate the law. The forms are then filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, an agency within the federal Treasury Department, to follow up on.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen delayed Comer’s request to view the SARs for two months, he claims in the book.
When Comer and members of his staff were finally granted access to peruse the documents at the US Department of the Treasury, as his team walked into the building, the elevators were out of order — a situation he felt was a fitting metaphor for the difficulties encountered as he tried to follow the money.
“When we got to the top of the building, I told my gasping colleagues, ‘It’s a good thing we didn’t have any senators with us, or they would have passed out halfway up,’” he writes regarding the 2023 visit.
The SARs were paramount to the investigation, and most of them had already been cited in a previous report on the Biden family’s wealth, Comer said.
“I knew that no bank would file a SAR on a family member of the sitting vice president of the United States without a great deal of confidence that a serious financial crime had been committed,” he writes, adding that the SARs indicated possible crimes ranging from money laundering to bribery.
They found 170 SARs regarding Hunter Biden — 20 more than previously known from the six different banks — as well as previously unknown accounts and 20 shell companies, all controlled by Hunter.
“The Bidens were also subjects of an additional 50 SARs filed against other people,” Comer writes.
An analysis of the Biden banking records, along with testimony from Hunter business associates before the committee, showed millions coming in from Chinese, Ukrainian, Romanian and Kazakh sources, according to Comer’s book.
Jim and Hunter were supposedly being paid by foreign companies to find them business leads and customers. However, there were no products sold or investment advice being dispensed, Comer said, adding the shell companies were simply taking in cash for access.
From May 2014 to April 2019, Hunter was paid in excess of $5 million by Burisma Energy Company in Ukraine for “occupying a fanciful board position,” Comer writes, adding that Hunter knew almost nothing about the energy sector and his primary worth was his proximity to the “Biden Brand.”
In one case, Kazakh businessman Kenes Rakishev wired $142,000 to Hunter to buy a Porsche in April 2014. The cash came at about the same time Joe Biden dined with Rakishev at a restaurant in Washington, at Hunter’s request, when Joe was still vice president.
Images of the pricey car were featured in photos on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which shows him smoking crack as the car revs up to 170 miles per hour.
The laptop, which was left at a Delaware repair shop and first revealed by The Post in 2020, contains thousands of emails, text messages and photos that detailed many of Hunter’s shady business dealings as well as his struggles with substance abuse.
Hunter Biden’s lack of expertise in the energy sector did not prevent him from demanding cash from Chinese Energy Company Ltd (CEFC), an energy and finance company.
The firm was linked to the Communist Party of China and its Belt and Road Initiative, “an international scheme to build infrastructure… in third-world countries by issuing loans the Chinese knew those countries could never pay,” Comer writes.
The Bidens began working with the conglomerate when Joe Biden was vice president, according to Comer’s book.
Comer was able to trace the bounty shared by the Biden family resulting from a July 30, 2017 WhatsApp call from Hunter Biden to CEFC associate Raymond Zhao. In that callhe demanded a $10 million payment, claiming that his father was sitting next to him.
As shown in The Post’s graphic, on August 8, Northern International Capital, a company affiliated with CEFC, sent $5 million to Hudson West III, a joint venture set up by Hunter and Gongwen Dong, another CEFC associate.
That same day, Hudson West III sent $400,000 to Owasco PC, a company controlled by Hunter Biden.
Six days after that, on August 14, Owasco sent $150,000 to Lion Hall Group, which was controlled by Jim Biden and his wife, Sara Biden.
On August 28, Sara withdrew $50,000 in cash from Lion Hall Group, and deposited the cash in a joint account that she has with her husband, Jim Biden. On September 3, Sara wrote a check to Joe for $40,000 with “loan repayment” in the memo field.
Although Comer said he knew he had a “smoking gun” when he found the check, which he claims showed money laundering, most of the mainstream press was unimpressed; even as Jim Biden –“by far the least believable” of the witnesses who appeared before his committee — confirmed there was no loan agreement for that or a later “repayment” of $200,000 to his brother in 2018.
Last month, the National Archives released bombshell photos of Joe Biden introducing Hunter to Chinese leader Xi Jinping and other business leaders on a state visit to China in December 2013.
The first son’s primary goal was “to make billions, not just millions” for the family, according to Jason Galanis, a former Hunter business associate who testified from a prison cell, where he is serving 16 years for fraud.
Hunter, who was convicted on gun charges and tax evasion, was luckier than Galanis. He received a controversial pardon from his father last year.
Joe Biden was also a willing participant in his son’s get rich quick schemes — “the big guy” who received 10 percent, Comer writes.
In the eight years he served as vice president he gave two speeches in Romania in 2014 and 2015 “decrying corruption in the country while his family participated in it.” Biden made the first speech on May 21, 2014.
“Corruption is just another form of tyranny,” Joe said as part of that speech.
Months after that speech, the Bidens received more than $1 million from a company controlled by Gabriel Popoviciu, a Romanian businessman being investigated for corruption, through a Biden family associate, according to Comer.
Biden also lectured Ukraine on corruption at the same time Hunter was receiving cash to sit on Burisma’s board in 2016. The payments were under threat because of allegations of corruption by Burisma executives.
In a panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations in January 2018, Biden admitted he had threatened to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees to the country unless the Ukraine government fired Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor investigating Burisma.
Biden gave them six hours to do so before he boarded Air Force Two to fly home, writes Comer.
“Later, Biden added his famous line ‘son of a b—ch, they fired him!’” writes Comer. Shokin was fired by a parliamentary vote in March 2016 and his replacement dropped the investigation into Burisma.
Despite the difficulties of investigating the assets of the first family, Comer and his team of researchers were determined to reveal what he calls “the biggest corruption scandal of my lifetime.”
His work has led to “a historic lack of confidence in our nation’s federal law enforcement agencies” and likely led to the routing of the Democrats at the November polls, he writes.
In the end, Comer credits his investigation with giving American voters “an opportunity to decide for themselves… what the appropriate form of accountability could be for Joe Biden and his allies.”
