Meetings at Joe’s, emails from Air Force 2 and favors for Miguel: Hunter Biden’s laptop reveals more about First Son’s shady deals

Now president, Biden has steadfastly denied involvement in his son Hunter’s business schemes, most of which appear to involve trading on the family name to score lucrative deals abroad. Yet the newest batch of information from his laptop, published by the New York Post, shows him posing with Hunter, his US business partner, and three Mexican magnates at the official vice-presidential residence after a breakfast meeting in 2015.

Post columnist Miranda Devine, whose book about the ‘Laptop from Hell’ is coming out in September, laid out the information in an opinion piece on Wednesday evening. She said five photos date-stamped on November 19, 2015 show Joe Biden, Hunter, his business partner Jeff Cooper, and Mexican billionaires Carlos Slim and Miguel Aleman Velasco. 

There is no mistaking the background of the photos: the living room of the Naval Observatory residence, painted in a color chosen by then-Second Lady Jill Biden, and decorated with distinctive paintings and family photographs.

Slim is best known as the telecommunications mogul that rescued the New York Times from bankruptcy in 2008 and became its largest single shareholder in January 2015. One photo also features Velasco’s son Miguel Aleman Magnani, founder of the budget airline Interjet – whose Acapulco villa Hunter and his wife stayed in earlier that year.

Hunter had done favors for Magnani, too. In 2013, he secured him three tickets to the Obama-Biden inaugural ball. In March 2014 and January 2015, he set up meetings with Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and called him to “let him know we are buddies,” according to emails on the laptop. 

In an email to Foxx’s scheduling director, Laura DeCastro ahead of the second meeting, Hunter wrote that Aleman “is a close family friend, but I have no business with the company.” A separate meeting was set up with the Federal Aviation Authority administrator as well.

Yet when Hunter expected Magnani to help smooth out visa problems for Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky – owner of Burisma, which hired the younger Biden to sit on its board after the 2014 coup in Kiev – the Mexican magnate did not come through.

“Going to have to do some serious back pedaling with Burisma,” Hunter emailed Cooper on February 16, 2015, adding it would “most likely” jeopardize his board position, though in the end it did not.

“I am shocked Miguel didn’t come through at crunch time,” Cooper replied, adding that “they clearly value the relationship with your family AND they know they could sustain serious damage here by making enemies with you… Maybe a call from you or your dad to his dad? Maybe that shakes things loose.”

After the election, Hunter admitted the laptop – abandoned in a Delaware repair shop and turned over to both the Post and the federal authorities – “could be” his, but said he couldn’t remember, referring to the time period when he was addicted to crack cocaine. He maintained it could have been hacked or altered by “Russian” spies or someone, but independent forensic experts have concluded its contents are authentic.

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