In the weeks before he landed a deal with a Ukrainian gas company in 2014, Hunter Biden strategized with his business partner on how to leverage an upcoming official trip to Kiev by his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to clinch the lucrative arrangement, according to emails obtained a year ago by the FBI.
The communications reviewed by Just the News show that the younger Biden referred to his father as “my guy” and took credit for “adding value” because the vice president made comments to Ukrainian leaders about natural gas production that might benefit his new client.
The memos also show how Hunter Biden pressed to get Burisma Holdings to sign some sort of consulting deal with him and his business partner Devon Archer before the U.S. vice president visited Ukraine on April 21-22, 2014.
“The contract should begin now — not after the upcoming visit of my guy,” Hunter Biden wrote Archer in a detailed strategy email on April 13, 2014, a week before his father’s high-profile visit.
The memo shows Hunter Biden already knew he was going to be appointed to Burisma’s board along with Archer in mid-April 2014 — a month before it was announced — and that he also wanted Burisma to pay an additional consulting fee to him or his law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, referred to in the emails as “BSF.”
The deal with Burisma “should include a retainer in the range of 25k p/m w/ additional fees where appropriate for more in depth work to go to BSF for our protection,” Hunter Biden wrote. “Complete separate from our respective deals re board participation.”
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Records previously obtained by Just the News show Burisma paid Boies Schiller Flexner a $250,000 retainer on July 5, 2014 as well as more than $3 million between 2014 and 2016 to a firm connected to Archer and Hunter Biden called Rosemont Seneca Bohais.
The emails were provided to the FBI last December as part of a laptop hard drive believed to belong to Hunter Biden that had been left at a repair shop in Delaware. The shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, turned over a copy of the hard drive to agents under a federal grand jury subpoena.
Mac Isaac’s lawyer, Brian Della Rocca, confirmed to Just the News on Tuesday that the emails detailing Hunter Biden’s efforts to land the Burisma deal in 2014 were on the hard drive turned over to the FBI.
Hunter Biden confirmed Dec. 9 that he is under criminal investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware for his “tax affairs,” but he and his father have insisted he did nothing wrong.
Joe Biden on Tuesday doubled down on his earlier claims that information on the laptop was “Russian disinformation” designed to impugn his family. But the nation’s top spy, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, has declared there is no evidence the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The FBI has not disputed that assertion and said it had nothing to add to Ratcliffe’s assessment.
A senior law enforcement official told Just the News that the FBI is treating the laptop as evidence and in some cases has corroborated information on it from other sources, including cooperating witnesses and other data repositories.
George Mesires, one of Hunter Biden’s attorneys, did not respond to an email seeking comment on Tuesday.
If corroborated by the FBI, the emails would provide the most direct evidence to date of how Hunter Biden traded on his father’s name to score business with a Ukrainian company run by an oligarch who was under criminal investigation at the time. The emails provide no indication that Joe Biden was aware of what his son was doing in Ukraine…
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