Seven years have passed since Donald Trump began his presidential campaign, so Slate readers have likely figured out their own methods of avoiding, deflecting, or gently participating in Trump-related political “discussions” with their families at the holidays.
The Hunter Biden situation, though, presents a new challenge, simply because of the sheer breadth and complexity of the naughty behavior (Santa Claus reference!) that the president’s black-sheep son has been accused of being involved in (or has thoroughly been proven to be involved in). Below, a guide to addressing and understanding conservative relatives’ Hunter-related concerns.
I’ve really been tuning this out—what’s the gist of the Hunter Biden chatter?
OK, so, there are a few things going on. To take a step back, in 2019, the Trump campaign and prominent conservative figures began arguing that Joe Biden, while he was vice president under Obama, offered Ukraine $1 billion in aid in a quid pro quo deal—or, alternately, that Biden had pressured the country to remove its top prosecutor from office—in order to protect the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma from domestic investigation.
The reason, conservatives claimed, was that the vice president’s son, Hunter, was on Burisma’s board, and that the vice president wanted to protect his son’s interests.
Now, three things are true: Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma, starting in 2014 and until 2019. As vice president, Biden had pushed Ukraine to remove its top prosecutor in 2015. And he had used the $1 billion in aid as leverage to help get that done. But that’s because the prosecutor was widely seen as corrupt by the international community. (Other Western leaders had also called for the prosecutor’s ouster before Biden got involved, and Biden was, according to the Washington Post, “carrying out a policy developed at the State Department and coordinated with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.”)
Furthermore, one of the reasons the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was seen as corrupt was in part because he had failed to investigate allegations of embezzlement and other wrongdoing at Burisma.
It’s fair to say (to Uncle Bob, or whoever else needs to hear it) that claims that Joe Biden protected Burisma to safeguard his son’s interests are politically motivated, and constitute misinformation. If the vice president had been trying to shield his son (or enrich his son), in this particular circumstance, he chose the exact wrong way to do it.
Hmm, OK. But my Aunt Maria is saying something about … the New York Post?
Yes, but before we get there: In 2020, before the presidential election that year, a 64-page document purporting to be the work of an “intelligence firm” called Typhoon Investigations began circulating on the internet. That document claimed that Hunter Biden had business deals with China’s Communist Party—or companies closely associated with the party—that supported China’s intelligence and business interests over those of the U.S. Newt Gingrich and other public figures promoted the report. But that document was a fake. Its named author and purported firm do not really exist. Still, Hunter Biden has had some business interests in China, and there are legitimate arguments to be made that those dealings could have created the appearance of a conflict of interest for the elder Biden. More on that later.
Then, in October 2020, the New York Post published a story featuring emails and other materials recovered from a laptop that the paper said had belonged to Hunter Biden. Those materials included a couple of emails that were misread to imply that Joe Biden had been involved in some of his son’s business deals in Ukraine and China in a way that would have been potentially corrupt, or at least a conflict of interest.
Later, the New York Times did verify that these emails and other materials—or at least a fair amount of them—were authentic. But at the time, many in the media worried that these emails had been hacked, stolen, or doctored, or weren’t real at all. Twitter responded by banning any links to the New York Post article, citing a policy against allowing the publication of hacked materials and private information. It then locked the account of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany when she promoted the article, and it took down the New York Post’s account. Late the next day, facing an intense backlash, Twitter began relaxing those policies. It lifted the restrictions on posting and sharing the link the following day, though it continued to ban the New York Post’s account for another couple of weeks.
All this set off a bigger debate.
For a lot of conservatives, it was proof of an increasingly popular claim: that the Big Tech companies they had come to distrust were engaged in censorship. The controversy thus came to be less about Hunter Biden and more about the belief that allegations against him were covered up. That’s what the most recent Hunter Biden brouhaha has been about: On Dec. 2 of this year, journalist Matt Taibbi published Twitter’s internal correspondence about the laptop story, which he framed as proof that Twitter had done the bidding of Democrats and suppressed bad news about Hunter Biden. Decisions at Twitter about the laptop story were made well before Elon Musk took over the company, and it was Musk’s team that gave the internal documents to Taibbi in order to purportedly demonstrate the previous regime’s bias.
Media outlets had previously reported on Twitter’s decision—and reversal—in 2020.
OK, so why does my cousin Peter talk about the Hunter Biden emails as if they’re so damning?
In a 2017 email that was uncovered in the laptop dump, a business associate of Hunter’s used the phrase “10 held by H for the big guy?” in an email about a partnership that Hunter and his uncle Jim Biden were forming with a Chinese energy conglomerate called CEFC China Energy.
One of the partners in the deal, Anthony Bobulinski, has said that “H” was Hunter and the “big guy” was Joe Biden. That wouldn’t be great—a former vice president (and future president) getting in on a business deal with a Chinese energy company! Except there’s no real evidence that he did: The draft agreement that circulated afterward did not mention Joe Biden; nor did the signed company agreement. Other business associates have said Joe Biden was not involved in the discussions.
The second allegedly incriminating email was called the “smoking-gun email” by the New York Post. In an April 2015 message, a Burisma executive thanked Hunter for “giving an opportunity to meet your father,” reportedly at a dinner that had taken place the previous day. This exchange occurred before the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor, so it excited Trumpworld because it appeared to prove that Joe Biden had lied when he said during the 2020 presidential campaign that he hadn’t known about Hunter’s work in Ukraine. But we don’t know for sure that the Burisma exec actually did attend the dinner, which took place at Cafe Milano in D.C. and was attended by about a dozen people. (He wasn’t on the guest list.) Nor do we know how long Joe Biden was there. (At least one person has said the vice president only stopped by briefly to visit with a leader in the Greek Orthodox Church.) So it doesn’t necessarily mean that Joe Biden and the Burisma executive had a one-on-one conversation or that Burisma was discussed at all. In any case, whether or not Joe Biden spoke to the executive, a Republican-led Senate investigation into the Bidens’ Ukraine activities found no evidence that Joe Biden took any actions that might have benefited his son.
A third email, from 2017, caught the attention of Trump supporters as well. In this message, Hunter Biden emailed the manager of a building in Washington, D.C., where he was renting office space to “have keys made for new office mates.” Hunter made it clear, in a request he made in the same email for signs for the office, that the space would house the “Biden Foundation” and “Hudson West (CEFC U.S.).” And he asked for keys for Joe and Jill Biden, in addition to other people, including someone he described as an “emissary” of CEFC. Representatives for the Biden Foundation told the Washington Post they had not considered that space for an office. And the property manager told the Washington Post that Hunter Biden never picked up the keys for the “new office mates.”
So this all comes down to conspiracy theorists making a big to-do out of a few cryptic emails?
Well, the conspiracy theorists in this case are high-ranking Republican members of the House of Representatives. But also—and this is unfortunate—Hunter’s business and personal problems have given Republicans a lot to work with politically.
Hunter joined Burisma’s board when the company’s owner was already under investigation by international entities for corruption. This was, admittedly, not a good look for the younger Biden, who received up to $50,000 per month from the position. (This was also not long after he was discharged from the Navy Reserve for cocaine use.) Given Biden’s lack of any expertise in Ukraine or in energy production, it seems plausible that Burisma brought him on because the company thought the younger Biden might protect them from investigation.
Also, Hunter was on the board of a Chinese company called BHR Equity Investment Fund Management, and he bought 10 percent of it in 2017. He stepped down from the board in 2019 over concerns his position created the appearance of a conflict of interest for his father—a position that Republicans enthusiastically seized upon.
Also, remember that Hunter and his uncle Jim had tried to strike that deal with the Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC. (They called their business entity Oneida Holdings.) Hunter also tried to secure a $40 million project for CEFC to produce liquefied natural gas in Louisiana. That plan collapsed in 2018.
Again, none of these plans were illegal, but that doesn’t make them ideal for the adult son of a vice president or U.S. presidential candidate.
What the heck? Why didn’t Joe Biden tell his son that this would all look sketchy?
According to the New Yorker, officials who were concerned about Hunter’s activity during Joe Biden’s vice presidency didn’t bring it up because it was personally sensitive, particularly given that Biden’s other son, Beau, was dying from cancer at the time: “The Vice-President had an unwritten ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy when it came to his family members’ business decisions,” the New Yorker story said.
Does all this mean Hunter Biden hasn’t committed any crimes? That would come as a shock to my Uncle Horace and Aunt Geraldine.
Well, the Justice Department has been investigating him over potential tax crimes, as well as potential violations of foreign lobbying and money laundering rules, largely because of his work in Ukraine, but also because of business relationships in China and Kazakhstan. Still, none of these investigations appear to implicate Joe Biden.
But, again, even if something isn’t criminal, that doesn’t mean it’s not unsavory. Hunter joined Burisma when it was already dealing with a corruption scandal, and his natural gas partnership plan with the Chinese energy conglomerate fell apart when the chairman of that company was arrested. Plus, Hunter Biden was clearly aware that his father’s position was an asset to him. According to the New York Times, he wrote in a 2014 email to a business partner that they should characterize an upcoming visit to Ukraine by Vice President Biden as something that informed their work with Burisma. (He did also say in that email that what his father would do in the country “is out of our hands” and that Burisma’s officials “need to know in no uncertain terms that we will not and cannot intervene directly with domestic policymakers.”)
So, what’s the deal with the laptop my brother Kevin is always going on about? Where did those files come from?
The story published by the New York Post goes like this: Hunter Biden visited a computer repair shop in Delaware in April 2019 to drop off three water-damaged laptops and never returned to pick them up. The owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, is legally blind, so he could not visually confirm Hunter’s identity, but he did say that Hunter identified himself by name and signed a receipt. One of the laptops also had a Beau Biden Foundation sticker on it. Mac Isaac, a somewhat confused and conspiracy-minded Trump supporter, eventually realized the scandalous (and potentially criminal) nature of the materials on the laptops and called the authorities. He also kept a copy of the materials on the hard drive, which he handed over to Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer. Giuliani, in turn, leaked them to the New York Post.
But not everyone bought that story. Fox News was approached first and refused to run the story because they couldn’t verify the origins of the files. One New York Post reporter refused to put his name on the original story about it.
Now we know that the materials the New York Post reported on have been largely authenticated. But where those files originally came from remains somewhat unclear. The files contained sexually explicit material, including photos of Hunter Biden; there was a lot of talk about whether this information came to light because Hunter was hacked.
Also, according to Time, two unidentified people in Ukraine were approached about buying some of Hunter Biden’s emails in 2019. We don’t know if those emails are even supposed to be the same emails that the New York Post got! There are many unanswered questions.
My liberal father, Francois, has been saying that Russians leaked those emails, and that this whole story was a Russian attempt to meddle in our elections. Is he right?
Lots of people have raised the possibility, but there’s no reporting that shows that Russia or any foreign power had anything to do with any of this.
OK. Was there anything else of note in the files that may or may not have come from Hunter Biden’s old laptop?
Apart from those email exchanges, and the sexually explicit material, we also saw texts in which the elder Biden tried to comfort his son as Hunter berated himself for his destructive behavior and became angry about being called a political liability.
All right. Can you explain the whole ongoing “Twitter files” thing to me now? That’s the big news right now, right? Anything criminal here?
Right, so: Elon Musk recently took over Twitter. (That was a whole thing.)
Musk agrees with right-wing claims that Big Tech is (or has been) anti-conservative, and he handed a bunch of internal Twitter communications and records from before he was in charge to controversial journalists in an effort to prove his point. Those journalists did tweet threads (naturally) that included screenshots of internal discussions within Twitter over content moderation. The idea was to show that Twitter was not as into “free speech” as it claimed.
After the first thread by the journalist Matt Taibbi, which was published on Dec. 2, a lot of conservatives, including Musk, claimed that the internal communications proved Twitter had, for political reasons, suppressed the Hunter Biden New York Post story and silenced his critics. (I won’t get into the later installments of this, as they don’t deal with Hunter Biden.)
But the internal communications actually show the opposite. You have to remember that social media companies were worried about accidentally playing a part in a foreign election interference/misinformation campaign à la the 2016 election.
The internal communications, which are from October 2020, show that immediately after the New York Post story was published—soon before the election—Twitter officials debated what to do with possibly hacked, stolen, or false information. In this tweet, you can see how anxious the officials were over the unknown origins of the materials. The assumption at the time was that the email leak was a politically motivated act, given Russian involvement in Hillary Clinton’s email leak.
Initially, Twitter limited the spread of the New York Post story, blocked links to the story, marked it at one point as “potentially unsafe,” and temporarily locked the account of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Wider discussion of the story by Twitter users was not limited. (Facebook also limited the spread of the story for a period while fact-checkers looked into it.)
What about my Aunt Betty’s claim that Twitter was taking orders from the Democrats?
That’s probably in reference to an email in which a Twitter employee pasted the URLs of several tweets and wrote “more to review from the Biden team.” Another employee responded, “handled these.” That might sound suspicious, but Taibbi admitted that both the Biden campaign and the Trump White House campaigns routinely requested reviews of tweets and had them “honored.” And in this case, the Wayback Machine internet archive shows that the URLs flagged by the Biden team showed sexual material, including photos of Hunter Biden with his penis exposed.
Still, Betty—and her brother-in-law, Jamal—say this is a First Amendment/free speech violation. What do I tell her?
First off, Twitter is a private company, and handling obscene and false material is part of their general corporate responsibility. Second, the emails were a request for review (it literally says “more to review”)—not an order to have them taken down. Third, Biden was not yet president, so even if his team had sent a very firmly worded request, it wasn’t coming from the government. And nude images, even of political figures, are certainly violations of Twitter’s terms of service.
So Twitter did nothing wrong?
Well, no, that’s up for debate. A lot of critics think it was a very wrong decision to clamp down on the New York Post story. Including Twitter’s then-CEO, Jack Dorsey, who called it a “total mistake.” But again, that’s not because it was a political decision, but simply a bad content-moderation decision. (Dorsey admitted that communication around the decision had been lacking. “And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable,” he wrote on Twitter.) Afterward, Twitter changed its policies about sharing “hacked materials.”
My too-online cousin Alice likes to complain that Twitter’s interference here may have cost Trump the election.
Well, some evidence suggests that the social media ban on the New York Post story actually boosted the attention the issue got. The Bidens’ connections to Ukraine had also been publicized well before the laptop story broke—in fact, they were one of the central issues involved in Trump’s first impeachment.
Hmm, well what about Alice’s complaints about how the media handled this story overall?
Look, debating how much something should or shouldn’t be covered is all part of routine media criticism. But you’ve gotta remember, this was the first presidential election to occur after Russia had flooded our political system with both fully fabricated misinformation and authentic material that was obtained illegally. There’s a reason every other mainstream media outlet was cautious about this story. It took the New York Times and the Washington Post quite a while to be able to independently verify the authenticity of the materials.
My son Barrington told me that there are thousands of photos out there that prove Hunter Biden was torturing children. I know that’s not right!
Frustratingly, there are many out-there conspiracy theories. I can’t fact-check them all for you in one go. The good news, though, is that fact-checking sites have done a lot of this work! If your loved one has made this type of bizarro claim about the younger Biden, I recommend you try searching the specifics in PolitiFact or FactCheck.org.
My liberal Aunt Patricia seems to really like Hunter.
It’s possible Patricia has swung too far in the other direction. Or that she is either attracted to—or ignoring—some of the less savory things about Hunter. He has struggled with addiction, but that, and his somewhat unconventional personal life, shouldn’t factor into any of these conspiracy theory discussions, so we’re not commenting on it. But Hunter has done some legitimately dubious things. For example, it’s possible he could be still found guilty of tax fraud or other crimes. And the Twitter threads aren’t the end of this: House Republicans have called for an investigation into Hunter’s business dealings. (They would really love to keep Hunter-related conspiracy theories in the news.) So I would gently urge your aunt Patricia to not go too hard on the Hunter train.
