Hunter Biden was hit with a double whammy Wednesday.
First, a new filing by the prosecution in his upcoming gun-felony trial in Delaware poured scorn on Hunter’s legal team’s bizarrely persistent denial that his laptop and its contents are authentic.
Refusing to concede the laptop is his and pretending it might have been stolen by “Russians” or “hacked” by Rudy Giuliani has long been Hunter’s mantra, but special counsel David Weiss and his deputies Derek Hines and Leo Wise demolished the tall tales in a brutal memo, one of 13 lodged with the court Wednesday.
“The defendant’s theory about the laptop is a conspiracy theory with no supporting evidence,” said the filing signed by Weiss.
Hunter’s “laptop is real (it will be introduced as a trial exhibit) and it contains significant evidence of the defendant’s guilt.”
‘Self-authenticating’
The prosecutors also said the laptop is “self-authenticating” and is corroborated by Hunter’s iCloud data that come from Apple.
“What are the messages the defendant is claiming were somehow retroactively planted into his nonfunctional laptop, and what is the evidence of that? There is none. He has not shown any of the actual evidence in this case is unreliable or inauthentic, because there is none.”
Ouch.
Then IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler delivered 100 pages of new bombshell evidence showing Hunter lied repeatedly to investigators in his sworn congressional testimony in February, prompting House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith to raise the prospect of perjury charges against the first son.
Shapley also produced a document that adds further weight to the suspicion that Hunter’s “sugar brother,” bong-smoking Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, was under CIA protection.
Hunter lied about his shakedown WhatsApp message to CEFC employee Raymond Zhao on July 30, 2017, said Smith, when his committee voted to publicly release the new whistleblower documents Wednesday.
“These documents make clear that Hunter Biden was using his father’s name to shake down a Chinese businessman — and it worked. And when confronted by congressional investigators about it, he lied,” the panel said.
Flagging potential felony charges against Hunter, Smith said: “Lying during sworn testimony is a felony offense that the Department of Justice has prosecuted numerous individuals for in recent years, and the American people expect the same accountability for the son of the president of the United States.”
‘Commitment’
Hunter, who was at his father’s place in Greenville, Del., when he sent the WhatsApp in the summer of 2017, had written to Zhao: “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled . . .
“If I get a call or text from anyone [else], I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.
“All too often people mistake kindness for weakness — and all too often I am standing over top of them saying I warned you.”
Within nine days of the threats, CEFC sent $5.1 million to Hunter.
But when Hunter was asked about the WhatsApp message during his deposition three months ago, he “repeatedly lied to Congress . . . to distance his involvement in what should be considered a clear scheme to enrich the Biden family,” said Smith.
“In the deposition, Hunter Biden sought to dismiss the message, claiming that he was either ‘high or drunk’ when he sent it, and had sent it to the wrong Zhao, not the one affiliated with CEFC.
Hunter claimed under oath that the recipient, “had no understanding or even remotely knew what . . . I was even . . . talking about.”
Phone records produced by the IRS whistleblowers show that Hunter did send the message to the correct Raymond Zhao “who not only was affiliated with CEFC but knew exactly what Hunter Biden was talking about.”
Hunter also lied in his deposition when “he claimed he was not the corporate secretary of Rosemont Seneca Bohai and that the shell company he established with Devon Archer and its associated bank accounts were not under his control nor affiliated with him.”
In his handwriting
“The truth is in his own handwriting, and it is in front of our committee today,” said Smith.
“On an official Rosemont Seneca Bohai document accepting yet another foreign payment, Hunter Biden wrote, ‘I, Robert Hunter Biden, hereby certify that I am the duly elected, qualified and acting Secretary of Rosemont Seneca Bohai, LLC.’ ”
Hunter lied again, said Smith, when he denied helping anyone obtain US visas.
Shapley and Ziegler gave the committee an email in which Hunter’s then-business partner Archer wrote: “Hunter is checking with Miguel Aleman to see if he can provide cover to Kola on the visa,” wrote Archer.
“Kola” was Mykola Zlochevsky, the Burisma CEO whose US visa had been revoked.
This latest tranche of whistleblower documents dealt a devastating blow to Hunter’s remaining credibility less than two weeks before he has to appear in court in Wilmington over charges that he lied about his drug use on a background check form when buying a gun in 2018.
The new evidence about the CIA’s intervention in the five-year criminal investigation into Hunter raises questions about the agency’s role in other aspects of the Biden protection racket.
Shapley produced an affidavit and emails showing that Delaware Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf told him that “she and DOJ Tax Attorney Jack Morgan had recently returned from the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where they had been summoned to discuss Kevin Morris . . . and as a result we could no longer pursue him as a witness . . . for the investigation.”
CIA’s shadowy hand
Despite having a high-level security clearance, Shapley was never given the classified briefing he requested to understand why Morris was off-limits, even while the lawyer was an integral part of the tax case, after lending Hunter more than $6 million to pay off his tax debts and fund his ritzy lifestyle.
The CIA’s shadowy hand can be seen elsewhere in the Hunter Biden story, including in the rapid approval of the “Dirty 51” letter signed by 51 former intelligence operatives (mainly from the CIA) before the 2020 election that falsely claimed that Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation.
Expect more information from the House Judiciary Committee later in the year as they interview CIA employees.
Hunter did get some good news Wednesday.
The judge in California agreed to move his tax trial to Sept. 5, from its original date of June 20 when it would have butted up against his gun trial.
However, for his father’s re-election campaign, the timing could hardly be worse.
Given that the indictment refers to the 2014 and 2015 tax years, the evidence is still live, even though Weiss allowed the statute of limitations to run out on those years.
So, less than eight weeks before the election, the trial places on the table for public consumption a period that covers Joe’s role in ousting Ukraine’s top prosecutor Viktor Shokin and any potential foreign lobbying charges relating to Burisma.
The pressure on Hunter to settle the case before trial will be immense.
