Jim Geraghty at National Review Online has put together a timeline detailing the career of Hunter Biden:
April 2014: Hunter Biden joins the board of Burisma Holdings. Alan Apter, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker who was chairman of Burisma, said at the time, “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals.” Biden’s primary duty is to attend board meetings and energy forums in Europe once or twice a year, and he is paid $50,000 per month.
Apter added, “This is totally based on merit.”
May 13, 2014: At the White House, Press Secretary Jay Carney responds to a question about Hunter Biden’s joining the board and the appearance of a potential conflict of interest:
I would refer you to the vice president’s office. I saw those reports. You know, Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice president or president. But I would refer you to the vice president’s office.
The same day, at a State Department press briefing, AP reporter Matt Lee asks, “Does this building diplomatically have any concerns about potential perceptions of conflict or/cronyism — which is what you’ve often accused the Russians of doing?”
“No, he’s a private citizen,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki replied.
May 14, 2014: The U.K.-based Guardian newspaper blasts Biden’s new position, snarking, “Somebody needs to get involved in Ukraine’s corporate governance, and it might as well be a clutch of rich, well-connected American dudes with weird first names.” Washington Post columnist Adam Taylor writes:
The appointment of the vice president’s son to a Ukrainian oil board looks nepotistic at best, nefarious at worst. No matter how qualified Biden is, it ties into the idea that U.S. foreign policy is self-interested, and that’s a narrative Vladimir Putin has pushed during Ukraine’s crisis with references to Iraq and Libya.
Sometime in 2015: Chris Heinz ends his relationship with Rosemont Seneca.
December 8, 2015: Writing in the New York Times, James Risen says of the vice president’s trip to Ukraine:
The credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.
December 11, 2015: A New York Times editorial praises Biden’s message to the Ukrainian government but notes:
The credibility of Mr. Biden’s message may be undermined by the association of his son with a Ukrainian natural-gas company, Burisma Holdings, which is owned by a former government official suspected of corrupt practices. A spokesman for the son, Hunter Biden, argues that he joined the board of Burisma to strengthen its corporate governance. That may be so. But Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, has been under investigation in Britain and in Ukraine. It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.
A few days ago, Risen wrote at The Intercept that Biden’s message on the trip was being completely misinterpreted:
The then–vice president issued his demands for greater anti-corruption measures by the Ukrainian government despite the possibility that those demands would actually increase — not lessen — the chances that Hunter Biden and Burisma would face legal trouble in Ukraine.
December 2016: Hunter Biden and his wife, Kathleen, file for divorce. The divorce becomes official April 14, 2017. Sometime when Biden is “in the middle of the divorce,” he meets the Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming. As CNN described, “at its height, Ye’s company, CEFC China Energy, aligned itself so closely with the Chinese government that it was often hard to distinguish between the two.”
Go here to read the rest. Hunter Biden has never made an honest buck as an adult. His entire career has been trading off his father’s name, most of it involving blatant influence peddling. Yeah Democrats lets examine this in your impeachment investigation. Bring it.
I think the most interesting facet of this long corrupt narrative is that Burisma Holdings felt a need to pay Biden through a complicated banking transfer network, that went from the Ukraine to Latvia to a Cyprus bank (remember one of the accusations against Manafort was that he money-laundered Ukrainian money in an occult Cyprus bank). Rudy Giuliani asserts that he has the evidence of this money transfer, and George Stephanopoulos wisely didn’t ask to see it at his interview with Rudy this past week (“This Week” , 9/28/19).
As Giuliani points out, the very fact that Butisma’s efforts with this money transfer went to great lengths to hide it’s origins is virtual evidence of a corrupt payoff.
When Victor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor that Joe Biden got fired, inquired about the amount of actual total money that was wired to Hunter Biden at the Cypriot bank, the US Embassy (of course, under the then-Obama-Biden administration) advised the bank not to provide the information.
It was shortly after that that Joe Biden had the phone call with the prior Ukrainian president and fired Victor Shokin.