The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) formally alleged in court filings this week that Hunter Biden was involved in influence peddling overseas, confirming the reporting of Peter Schweizer in the 2018 book Secret Empires.
The court filings by the DOJ document payments made to Hunter Biden by Romanian oligarch Gabriel Popoviciu, who is now cooperating with DOJ prosecutors. They state that the deal was structured to avoid the filings required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
The documents show Hunter Biden was paid by Popoviciu while Joe Biden was vice president. Biden’s activity as president is not implicated in the filings.
On a special “emergency edition” podcast of The Drill Down podcast, Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers discuss the breaking news and take a well-earned victory lap.
“I think this is an appetizer for what is going to be the main course,” Schweizer tells Eggers. “I expect we’ll see similar announcements about China and Russia.”
Popoviciu hired Hunter Biden and an unnamed associate and paid their company, which would pass approximately one-third of the money to Hunter Biden. This was done, the Justice Department says, because the defendant was “concerned that lobbying work might cause political ramifications for the defendant’s father.”
The goal for Popoviciu was “to attempt to influence U.S. government agencies to investigate the Romanian investigation” into him, paying Biden and his associate more than $3 million to do so, according to a report in The Hill.
That would be a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which Hunter Biden himself acknowledged in messages included in the filing, where he said “we might be guilty of some FARA violations…”
Schweizer and his research team at the Government Accountability Institute reported on this and many other foreign business deals by Hunter Biden in 2018. The book was published 2,330 days ago. By contrast, it has been only 19 days since his father President Joe Biden relinquished his re-election campaign and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to run in his stead.
“This shows the protection around Joe Biden as a candidate has evaporated, and that at least some people in the Justice Department are trying to do their job when no longer constrained by political issues,” Schweizer said. “I imagine what we’re going to see before Joe Biden leaves office is that he is going to pardon Hunter Biden of these charges, which is a travesty.”
Schweizer also expects that further action from DOJ will likely follow, if the department wants “to be remotely consistent.” The Romanian case involves between $500,000 and $800,000, but the deals in China involve $30 million. The one in Ukraine involved about $6 million, and the deals in Russia amounted to about $3.5 million transferred to Hunter Biden’s businesses, all of which was reported in Secret Empires in 2018.
To paraphrase then Vice President Joe Biden’s whispered aside to President Barack Obama years ago, “this is a big f***ing deal.”
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