There may be a lot more to this story. For now, suffice it to say, it fits the pattern. Someone is giving money to one or more Bidens while seeking to work with Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden is in the middle of it.
The someone in this case is former FBI Director Louis Freeh, the timeframe is 2016, and the New York Post sums the matter up as follows: “Former FBI Director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a trust for two of President Biden’s grandchildren as he sought to pursue ‘some very good and profitable matters’ with him, newly surfaced emails revealed Thursday.”
The grandchildren in question are the children of Beau and Hallie Biden, Hunter Biden’s deceased brother and his sister-in-law. In a series of emails in 2016 and 2017, Freeh, a partner at the law firm of Freeh, Sporkin & Sullivan, discussed with Hunter the lurching progress of his effort to deposit the $100,000 with the trust for the Biden grandchildren. In fairness, we must note that Beau Biden died of brain cancer, a significant and painful event for the Biden family, and we can imagine a circle of friends closing ranks to contribute to a trust for the children.
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The terms in which the gift was discussed — e.g., Freeh’s possible misapprehension about donating to a “foundation,” and the references to “working with” Bidens and “profitable matters” accompanying the discussion of the gift — do cloud the issue, however. If Trumps were involved, and not Bidens, no one on the Left would give even a nanometer of quarter in such a case. Every communication would be treated as a cartel conspiracy.
The Biden history, in any case, doesn’t argue for assuming away the disquieting ambiguities.
Freeh apparently made the initial deposit in April 2016, but a year later he reported that his accountants objected to the form of the gift: “Freeh said that his accountants ‘now advise that since the grant did not go to a 501(c) organization, it was not a proper foundation gift’ and that he planned to fix the situation by making ‘a new $100k gift’ and having the trust ‘reimburse the foundation by paying it $100k.’”
Besides alluding to “good and profitable matters” with then Vice President Joe Biden, Freeh assured Hunter Biden that “I would be delighted to do future work with you.”
Freeh apologized for the “extra burden” attending his accountants’ concerns about the 2016 gift to the Biden children’s trust, but Hunter responded politely, “Thanks so much and of course no burden at all. Speak to you soon.”
We’re well past the time when the public might hear of a former FBI director laboring to give $100,000 to the family of the vice president, and not detect an odor coming from the transaction.
It doesn’t help that in the July 2016 emails (see the NY Post story), Freeh and Hunter Biden make reference to a ruling about an individual named “Gab” and “the abuse of office/power statute.” The individual is a Romanian businessman named Gabriel “Puiu” Popoviciu, with whom Hunter and his associates at the China Energy Fund Committee (CEFC) were working to, reportedly, “create the largest player on the real estate market in Romania and in Southeast Europe.”
The ruling about the “abuse of power/office statute” was related to charges pending against Popoviciu in Romania for a suspect real estate transaction dating to the mid-2000s. Popoviciu had more legal problems than that in his home country, and he had hired Freeh’s firm as part of his legal team, a move that seems to have been linked to the initiation of business dealings with Hunter Biden and Biden’s partner Tony Bobulinski.
Again, the emails discussing the pleasant news that “Gab” had received his favorable ruling were exchanged in July 2016. In an always-interesting twist of timing, Louis Freeh’s follow-on email about having to rejigger the gift to the Biden grandkids was sent in April 2017. That was the same month Popoviciu, represented by Freeh and working with Hunter, found out he was by no means in the clear in Romania, but in fact was convicted on corruption charges, for which he was sentenced in August 2017. (Upon which he fled the country, but was later apprehended in London.)
After Popoviciu’s April 2017 conviction, and the 2018 disappearance into China of CEFC’s (then) chief Ye Jianming, the prospective real estate investment plan crumbled.
You can’t go down every rat-hole, at least not every day of the week. There are undoubtedly important threads to pull on the outer layer of this little drama. Let them be pulled in due course. Meanwhile, the reflections on this event cannot be other than melancholy. Millions of Americans get no benefit of the doubt in such circumstances, and the discriminator now is too often political. Demanding that benefit for public officials is increasingly a bridge too far.
