There are red flags aplenty: Loan repayments between Joe Biden and his brother; Millions in promissory notes between Hunter Biden and a Democrat-donating Hollywood lawyer; and debt deals from Ukraine to China.
As the House impeachment inquiry heats up, investigators are increasingly focused on a trail of red ink that has become a recurring theme in evidence chronicling the first family’s finances.
“More loans, more loans, I've never seen so many loans,” House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer declared Friday night after Just the News reported that Hunter Biden has received at least $5.3 million in assistance since his father began running for president in 2020.
That assistance came in the form of promissory notes Hunter Biden signed with Hollywood lawyer and friend Kevin Morris, who also was a donor to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.
The appearance of loans in the first family's business empire burst into public view a year ago when emails on a Hunter Biden laptop seized by the FBI in 2019 and corroborating correspondence between Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and the FBI surfaced. That evidence suggested the first family was arranging with a Chinese energy conglomerate “an unsecured $5 million loan, intended to be forgivable, from CEFC in 2017."
This summer, two IRS whistleblowers testified to the House Ways and Means Committee and Chairman Jason Smith they had recommended felony tax evasion charges against Hunter Biden alleging the first son reclassified some income – including from his controversial Ukrainian energy deal with Burisma Holdings – as loans, but federal prosecutors declined to bring the case and allowed the statute of limitations to expire on some of the flagged transactions.
IRS agent Joseph Ziegler described the scheme in testimony to Congress.
"He also tried to -- the money that he earned from Hudson West III, he tried to say that that was a loan. Same thing we have all going along back to Burisma -- I'm loaning from my own capital in the company -- even though he didn't put any capital in the Hudson West III,” the agent testified. “And again, I go back to -- you can't loan yourself your own income.”
"He (Hunter Biden) took loans from that corporation -- which were distributions. And he didn't pay taxes on those loans,” Ziegler added. “All right. So essentially for 2014, we had found that Hunter didn't report any of the money he earned from Burisma. So the reason why this is important is because Hunter set it up this way, to not -- to essentially earn the money through his friend's corporation and then have his friend pay him back half of the money as loans, quote, unquote, loans.”
Last month, Comer’s team unveiled bombshell new evidence showing presidential brother James Biden used proceeds from a business deal involving a Chinese company and another from a financially troubled rural health care company to pay $240,000 to Joe Biden in 2017. The money was marked as “loan repayments,” and House investigators have since subpoenaed James Biden for any evidence of the loans.
New evidence emerged in late October showing that Hunter Biden received a $250,000 loan from a Chinese businessman in summer 2019, only three months after his father launched his 2020 presidential campaign. He later transferred the debt to Morris, the Hollywood lawyer and Democratic megadonor who he befriended, Just the News reported.
The House Oversight Committee first disclosed this summer that Hunter Biden had received a $250,000 wire in July 2019 and used his father’s address in Delaware for the transfer, though he was living in California at the time. It was one of the later known foreign payments that Hunter Biden received before he fell on hard times.
Documents gathered by federal law enforcement and reviewed by Just the News show Hunter Biden considered the wire to be a July 25, 2019 "loan" from Xiangsheng “Jonathan” Li, a Chinese businessman whom he had been doing business with for over a decade when they created an investment fund under the name Bohai Harvest RST (BHR).
After Joe Biden became president, the records show, Hunter Biden transferred the debt to Morris, the same Hollywood lawyer who lent him large sums of money starting in February 2020.
Comer told the Just the News, No Noise television show Friday night that his team has now tracked more than $10 million in loans involving Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and James Biden and their business, a massive sum for a president who has been fond of portraying himself politically as “Middle Class Joe.”
“We want to know more about these loans,” Comer told Just the News. “If my math is right, from what we've discovered in Hunter Biden's bank records that we've obtained, and Jim Biden's bank records we've obtained, plus your information that you uncovered today, that puts it somewhere around $10 million in loans to the Biden family.”
Comer said his investigators are focused on whether tax laws were followed, whether any of the loans were created to hide sources of income as the IRS whistleblower agents alleged and whether any of the transactions were in reality gifts and income disguised as debts. The White House and Hunter Biden have steadfastly denied any wrongdoing, suggesting Comer’s impeachment inquiry is just plain politics.
“I've never seen so many loans for a family that don't own any assets. They don't have a business, and no one knows what they do for a living to pay their bills,” Comer said during the television interview Friday night.
Remarkably, the earliest evidence that the Biden family was moving around money as loans or IOUs actually dates to 2010 when longtime business associate Eric Schwerin wrote to Hunter Biden that then-Vice President Joe Biden planned to sign over his Delaware tax refund to the future first son because he owed him money.
"I am depositing it in his account and writing a check in that amount back to you since he owes it to you," Schwerin wrote to Hunter Biden in June 2010 about the Delaware tax refund. "Don't think I need to run it by him, but if you want to go ahead."
As House Republicans try to build public support for impeaching Joe Biden, the tangle of loans has become increasingly important evidence in showing how the Bidens conducted their business, what their motives were and whether they cheated Americans out of tax dollars even as President Biden continues to make "tax fairness" and cracking down on tax cheaters a centerpiece of his policies heading into his 2024 re-election bid. Biden referred to the issue in his State of the Union address this year, promising to make "the wealthiest and biggest corporations begin to pay their fair share."
Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, the House Intelligence Committee Chairman, engaged in one particularly poignant exchange with IRS agent and whistleblower Gary Shapley during the summer that zeroed in on the possible tax issues, at least as they related to Hunter Biden and still allegedly unpaid taxes he owed for money he earned from Burisma.
“So [Hunter Biden] has in his pocket $125,000 of money that should have gone to federal government as taxes?” Turned asked. “In the state of Ohio, you’ve got an average family earning about $62,000 per household. That’s like two full households of tax income that he got to keep in his pocket. The thing I wonder is that he could pay that today. Right? Voluntarily?”
“If he chose to voluntarily, yes he could,” Shapley testified.
“And perhaps Mr. President, who’s supposed to be in charge of taxes coming to our nation, and who so frequently tells us that the American people aren’t paying enough taxes, might want to wander down the hall at the White House and turn to his son and say, ‘Hunter Biden, why don’t you pay your taxes for 2014 because I’ve got two men who just testified there’s $145,000 owed’ and he ought to cut the check,” Turner added.
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