by Seamus Bruner and John Solomon at Just the News
In his new memoir, Hunter Biden declares there is a simple explanation for a life filled with addiction to drugs and alcohol. “I have the capacity and tenacity to use to excess, and a single-minded unwillingness to quit,” he writes. “That makes addiction easy, rather than hard.”
Unraveling his extensive deals with foreign characters — some with controversial histories — while his father was in government, however, is a more complex story.
And no other anecdote illustrates that better than Hunter Biden’s brief engagement with a fugitive Ukrainian oligarch’s team in 2015, one that began with discussions about lobbying his father’s administration to make an indictment go away and ended with a separate $3 million deal and a handsome $275,000 transfer into a firm that routinely paid the younger Biden.
Following the money is a dizzying exercise, with multiple business firms and bank accounts and a discussion about one deal that ends with payment for another business opportunity.
The tale begins in April 2015, when Hunter Biden got an email from his business partner — the now-convicted felon Devon Archer — about a plan to assist the oligarch Dmitri Firtash, a Ukrainian who was under U.S. indictment by the Obama-Biden administration, and at the time, a fugitive.
The goal was to see whether Firtash’s felony indictment could be erased or eased with the help of the Obama-Biden State Department, where Hunter Biden’s father held much sway and where the vice president’s longtime national security adviser, Tony Blinken, served as deputy secretary under John Kerry, according to emails and interviews published last week by Just the News.
By June 2015, the discussions had evolved enough that a member of Firtash’s inner circle — childhood friend Hares Youssef — traveled to the United States to meet with Hunter Biden. Eventually, Biden told Youssef that he could not help on the Firtash case, and the conversation evolved to how Hunter Biden and his partner Archer might be able to help Youssef with one of his companies aspiring to create micropayment donations technology, Youssef told Just the News.
Youssef said Archer introduced him to a technology fund in Hawaii called mbloom and persuaded him to invest. By September 2015, Youssef said he was investing $3 million os his own money in mbloom, a transfer that got immediately flagged by U.S. banking officials, according to a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) filed with the Treasury Department and first revealed in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ FinCEN Files.
After Youssef’s money reached America, mbloom transferred much of the money to an affiliate company called mbloom BDC Advisor LLC, according to the the SAR report cited by the FinCen Files Web site. And mbloom BDC Advisors LLC sent $275,000 to a company controlled by Archer called Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC, according to records obtained by the FBI.
If Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC sounds familiar, it’s because that was the firm to which the Ukrainian gas company Burisma sent more than $3 million in payments after Hunter Biden joined its board, a relationship that started the whole Hunter Biden scandal and eventually became embroiled in Donald Trump’s first impeachment.
Hunter Biden routinely took payments of tens of thousands of dollars from Rosemont Seneca Bohai in 2014 and 2015. One of those payments occurred less than a week after mbloom BDC Advisors LLC sent a transfer to the Rosemont Seneca Bohai account/
One deal evolves to another, money comes from overseas and hops across an array of companies and accounts — and Hunter Biden ends up with some cash.
It’s a pattern that congressional investigators — who examined Hunter Biden’s extensive deals with China, Ukraine and Russia — say was repeated several times.
The Senate Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee staff spent more than a year investigating Hunter Biden’s businesses before concluding last fall that the Biden family may have been compromised by foreign dealings. Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who chaired the committee at the time, told Just the News that he realized just how complicated the Biden family deals were when his staff came across a half dozen or more entities all named Hudson West.
“It gets extremely difficult to unravel all these things,” Johnson said. “If you take a look at this, your head starts swimming of all the different entities. For example, Hudson West. There are eight or nine different Hudson West companies, right? It’s hard to keep all this stuff straight. And that’s the exact purpose of it, to try and hide it through multiple different transactions.”
While much is complex, some themes are recurring. Money flows to Hunter Biden-…
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