Hunter Biden sold more than just an illusion, biz partners had direct access to Joe Biden while VP

After Hunter Biden’s long-term business partner and associate Devon Archer was interviewed by congressional investigators about the Biden family’s alleged influence peddling scheme, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) told the media that Archer confirmed that Hunter Biden sold “the illusion of access” to his father, then-Vice President Biden.

Evidence shows Hunter Biden, in fact, provided real access to his father for his business partners, despite the president having claimed repeatedly that “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”

Here are several instances in which Hunter Biden provided direct access to the vice president for his business partners and associates:

Jonathan Li Meets with vice president Biden in Beijing

Hunter Biden acknowledged to the The New Yorker magazine that in December 2013 he introduced then-Vice President Biden to his business associate, Jonathan Li, in the lobby of the hotel in which they were staying during an official visit to Beijing.

“How do I go to Beijing, halfway around the world, and not see them for a cup of coffee?” Biden told the magazine, referring to his business partners.

Li is a Chinese businessman who ran the firm Bohai Capital. At the time of then-Vice President Biden’s visit to China, Li and Hunter Biden were already working on forming a new investment company that brought together Chinese capital with Hunter Biden's existing business enterprises.

Before the trip to Beijing, Li, Archer and Hunter Biden signed a memorandum of understanding to form a company named BHR Partners. Twelve days after the trip and the meeting with the vice president, BHR Partners was officially registered in China, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The New York Times reported the firm had “helped secure cobalt for the Chinese” in 2016, when Hunter Biden's father was still vice president.

Archer would later testify to another instance in which Li was given access to Vice President Biden by phone.

Archer told congressional investigators that he remembered another time in which Hunter Biden called his father while the partners were at a dinner in Beijing.

“Do you recall other times where Hunter Biden placed his dad on speakerphone?” investigators asked Archer.

Archer told them: “In you know, a dinner – a dinner in – with BHR, with Jonathan Li."

However, Archer testified then-Vice President Biden never spoke about the business with Hunter Biden’s partners when they were on the phone within Archer's earshot, including in the aforementioned meeting.

The Alemán Family Visits the White House

Miguel Alemán Velasco and son Miguel Alemán Magnani Jr. – descendants of a former Mexican president – both visited the White House in February 2014, according to White House visitor logs released by the Obama administration and news reports.

Velasco is a former senator and governor of the Mexican state of Veracruz and is an industrialist with ties to broadcast and aviation companies.

His company Interjet was forced into bankruptcy after Velasco was held liable in 2022 by a Mexican court to pay 689.3 million pesos ($739,891,173 USD) for unpaid taxes.

His son, Magnani, is as of 2021, living in exile in France to avoid the execution of an arrest warrant issued by Mexican authorities on tax fraud charges, according to Bloomberg News.

Hunter Biden worked closely with the Alemán family from 2014 to 2016, attempting to drum up business ventures in Mexico that would include roles for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holding Ltd., on whose board he served. 

Joe Biden was captured on camera giving them a tour of the White House Brady Press Briefing room, shown in photographs published by The Daily Mail. The photo memorialized the meeting with the Alemáns, Hunter Biden, the vice president and Jeff Cooper, a friend of Hunter Biden who was involved in the proposed business deals in Mexico.

“Do you have pictures from the lunch I had in dad's office (I think on 2/26) with Miguel Alleman [sic] Sr. And Jr. And Jeff Cooper?” Hunter Biden asked his father’s official White House photographer in an email obtained from his abandoned laptop.

According to an email from his laptop, Hunter Biden also arranged a meeting for Alemán Jr. with Obama-Biden administration Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. Alemán was the CEO of Interjet, the airline his father owned.

The biggest endeavor came with the proposed privatization of PEMEX, the Mexican state-owned oil company.

Archer, Hunter Biden and the Alemán family saw a business opportunity that would bring in some of Biden’s other contacts.

Hunter Biden wrote a detailed business proposal to his partners in a January 2015 email outlining a plan for the privatization of the company. He also sought to bring together Burisma, on whose board he and Archer served – and the Alemán group to jointly acquire PEMEX. 

Though the Alemán family received access to the vice president, the deal didn't happen.

During his last visit to Mexico City aboard Air Force Two with his father, Hunter Biden wrote to Miguel Alemán Jr. detailing his frustrations with the Alemán family and signaling that the relationship had become strenuous, according to an email obtained from his laptop. 

After complaining that the family had been ignoring him, Biden says: “And I really appreciate you letting me stay at your resort villa ... but I have brought every single person you have ever asked me to bring to the F'ing White House and the Vice President's house and the inauguration and then you go completely silent - I don't hear from you for months.”

He also wrote: “I don't know what it is that I did but I'd like to know why I've delivered on every single thing you've ever asked."

Though nothing ever came of the privatization deal, Hunter Biden provided access to his father in an attempt to grease the wheels of his dealings with the Alemán family, then complained about getting nothing in return.

Vadim Pozharksyi: Dinner and Phone Calls with the Vice President

As Just the News previously reported, then-Vice President Biden attended an April 2015 dinner that his son hosted at Café Milano that Burisma executive Vadim Pozharskyi attended, according to Archer’s testimony and an email from the Hunter Biden laptop, which he abandoned at a Delaware repair shop in 2019 and the content of which eventually was eventually made public.

President Biden's then-campaign senior adviser, now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken "played a role in the inception" in 2020 of a widely disseminated letter signed by 51 current and past intelligence officials claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was not to be given credence, being part of a "Russian disinformation campaign." Hunter Biden later denied knowing if the laptop was even his.

After the "Russian disinformation" narrative fell apart, in an remarkable about face in March of this year, not only did Hunter Biden claim that the laptop was legitimate and was indeed his, but even sued the repair shop owner for "trying to invade his privacy and wrongfully sharing his personal data for political purposes" according to CNN. 

Hunter Biden was making $1 million a year in fees from Burisma at the time for his service on the board.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent (sic) some time together,” Pozharskyi wrote Biden in an email following the dinner meeting. “It's realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”

Archer confirmed Pozharskyi’s presence at this meeting, in his testimony to Congress this summer.

Archer also testified to a phone call that Pozharskyi and Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky requested from Hunter Biden.

In December 2015, Pozharskyi and Zlochevsky requested the phone call so that Hunter Biden could “help them with some of that pressure” the Ukrainian government was putting on the company with its investigations by Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. 

“What did Hunter Biden do after he was given that request?” a congressional  investigator asked Archer.

Archer replied: “Listen, I did not hear this phone call, but he – he called his dad.” He also said Pozharskyi later told him  Hunter Biden had called his father.

The phone call took place days before then-Vice President Biden visited Ukraine and told President Petro Poroshenko that Shokin, the prosecutor who was putting “pressure” on Burisma, was so corrupt that he had to be fired in order for Ukraine could receive a $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee that it needed.

Joe Biden later bragged about this episode in a Council on Foreign Relations interview in 2018.

Yelena Baturina and Kenes Rakishev: Oligarchs Dine with the Vice President

In April 2014, Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina dined with Hunter Biden and the vice president at the same Café Milano, weeks after she “deposited $3.5 million into a bank account tied to Hunter Biden’s businesses and committed to invest in a New York real estate project with Biden’s partners,” as Just the News previously reported.

Notably, the Biden administration’s public sanctions list for Russian oligarchs does not include Baturina.

Archer testified to Congress that Baturina attended the D.C. dinner alongside other Biden business associates from Kazakhstan. He also testified to Vice President Joe Biden’s presence at the dinner.

“When did Joe Biden arrive at the dinner, if you can recall?” investigators asked Archer.

Archer replied: “He arrived somewhere – you know, sometime after we had started, but not – I don’t think we had eaten yet, but at some point he arrived.”

Hunter Biden also invited Kenes Rakishev, an oligarch from Kazakhstan, to the dinner. He and Archer were conducting business with Rakishev at the time, as Just the News previously reported.

At about the same time, Rakishev wired a Hunter Biden-connected entity $142,300, according to a House Oversight Committee report. The day after, the same amount was wired to a New Jersey car dealership to purchase a Porsche sports car for Hunter Biden.

Baturina and Rakishev were also invited to a spring 2015 dinner at Café Milano with Pozharskyi, according to reporting by the New York Post.

Michael Karloutsos: Family Friend and Business Partner

Michael Karloutsos, the son of a longtime friend of Joe Biden, also attended the April 2015 dinner at Café Milano at which the then-vice president joined his son’s business associates.

Father Alex Karloutsos, Michael’s father, is a Greek Orthodox priest and close friend to Joe Biden. Father Alex, as he is known, also attended the dinner. Hunter Biden told Michael Karloutsos that “the reason for the dinner is ostensibly to discuss food security.”

“Dad will be there but keep that btw us for now,” the younger Biden wrote to his guest, referring to the Vice President. “Everything is between us,” Karloutsos replied.

Karloutsos’s presence at the dinner has been reported before, but rarely mentioned is the fact that he and Hunter Biden were in the midst of an important business deal in Greece in partnership with a Chinese state-owned enterprise.

In his 2022 book "Red-handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win," investigative journalist and author Peter Schweizer detailed Hunter Biden and Michael Karloutsos’s efforts to acquire a subsidiary of the Greek national railway in partnership with the China Ocean Shipping Corporation.

COSCO is a Chinese state-owned enterprise that focuses on the shipping industry. The company had already acquired a majority of the Greek port of Piraeus and saw an opportunity to expand its reach in the Balkans. COSCO was recently hailed as a “Belt and Road Initiative success story” by Chinese state media for advancing Chinese economic interests in the region. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a Chinese infrastructure investment program designed to expand China’s access to the world economy and political influence in the regions it invests in.

The deal to acquire TrainOSE, as the subsidiary of the Greek national railway was called, fell through when the Italian National Railway outbid the consortium, but not until after Karloutsos met with Hunter Biden and the vice president at Café Milano.

The meeting appeared to be important for the deal, according to emails obtained from the Biden laptop.

After another prominent Greco-American, Mike Mantos, emailed Hunter Biden asking whether his planned dinner would interfere with Biden’s dinner at Café Milano, Biden told him that he was only inviting the Karloutsos family.

“Michael was going to bring big Greek shipping guy who moves a lot of cargo in the region,” Biden told the acquaintance.

The Evidence is Not an Illusion

On Sunday, The New York Times asserted that “no hard evidence has emerged that Mr. Biden personally participated in or profited from the business deals or used his office to benefit his son’s partners while he was vice president.”

This statement echoes Democrat assertions that Hunter Biden was only selling the “illusion of access” to his father. This is what Representative Dan Goldman told the media after the Oversight Committee interviewed Devon Archer. However, in his testimony, Archer called this phrasing “almost fair.” “Why almost fair,” Goldman asked Archer. “Because there – there is – there are touch points and contact points that I can't deny that happened, but nothing of material was discussed.”

The Biden administration also continues to assert that there is no evidence of the president’s wrongdoing.

Ian Sams, a senior adviser to Biden and spokesman for the White House Counsel’s office, wrote a memo to U.S. news media organizations with demands that they “ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies.”

House Republicans are moving forward with an impeachment inquiry into President Biden despite the White House’s claims that they have no evidence.

“After nearly 9 months of investigating, House Republicans haven’t been able to turn up any evidence of the President doing anything wrong,” Sams wrote in the memo. “House Republican leaders should be held accountable for the fact that they are lurching toward impeachment over allegations that are not only unfounded but, in virtually all cases, have been actively disproven,” he said later in the memo.

Yet, Just the News previously documented at least five stories Joe Biden told about the family business that turned out to be untrue, which House Republicans are citing as one reason for the inquiry.

Schweizer, whose 2018 book "Secret Empires" first revealed Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, told Just the News that “Team Biden continues to shift the goalposts.”

“First it was he never talked to his son about business, and never met his business partners," Schweizer said. "Now it is, we talked but it was only about the weather. The reality is there are numerous emails that offer plenty of evidence that Hunter Biden talked to his father about business matters often."

After repeated assertions from President Biden that he never talked business with his son, that he never met with his son’s business partners, and that information from Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, all of which have been proven untrue, the White House joins the media and Democrat representatives in claiming that there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

Schweizer told Just the News this is infact further evidence of a “factual retreat” by Biden’s camp.

“One has to ask themselves: Why has President Joe Biden repeatedly lied about his knowledge of, and involvement with his son's business partners over the course of years?” Schweizer said. “What is he trying to hide?  It is becoming abundantly clear now what he has been trying to hide."

Announcing the move to begin an impeachment inquiry, House Speaker McCarthy cited “serious and credible allegations into President Biden's conduct” uncovered by House Republicans so far in their probes.

“These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption and warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives,” McCarthy also said.