After years of denials, Hunter Biden on Wednesday acknowledged that Joe Biden was indeed “the Big Guy” referenced in an email about a business deal with a Chinese state-linked energy firm that resulted in a cash bonanza for Biden family members and other associates.
But, during his impeachment inquiry deposition on Capitol Hill, Hunter Biden denied his father was ever penciled in for a 10% stake.
“At one point, we asked Hunter about the 10% for the ‘big guy,’ ” Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a member of the House Oversight Committee, told Breitbart following Hunter’s six-hour, closed-door deposition. “We showed him the email … And he said, ‘Oh, that was after my father left office.’ ”
Wednesday's deposition marked the first time Hunter Biden has affirmed that his former business partner James Gilliar was referring to Joe Biden when he raised the prospect on May 13, 2017 of Hunter Biden holding a 10% stake in the lucrative joint venture involving CEFC China Energy “for the Big Guy.”
The email, found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, was first reported by the New York Post in October 2020 as part of a bombshell series of reports on the first son’s influence-peddling schemes.
“What’s wrong with having a pie-in-the-sky idea?” Hunter Biden reportedly said in response to the line of questioning, adding that he assumed his father “was done” with holding public office in 2017 after eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president.
Greene added that Hunter Biden stressed “there was no percentage for my father in the business,” which a source with direct knowledge of the deposition previously confirmed to The Post.
That source said Hunter Biden told investigators that Gilliar “was out of his mind for even suggesting Joe Biden get involved in their joint venture.”
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer described the deal involving CEFC China Energy as “money laundering” when speaking with reporters on a break from the deposition, pointing to a $40,000 check Joe Biden received from his brother James following a “complicated financial transaction.”
Comer released bank records last year showing CEFC, which was apparently part of the Chinese Communist Party’s “Belt and Road” foreign influence campaign, paid James and Hunter Biden $6.1 million in 2017 and 2018 — including a $5 million wire on Aug. 8, 2017, days after Hunter texted a CEFC translator that he was “sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”
Through a series of transfers to entities owned and controlled by Hunter Biden, Comer said those funds flowed to other Biden family members, with $50,000 landing in a personal checking account for James and his wife, Sara — and the first brother writing the $40,000 check to the former vice president as a “loan repayment.”
At another point in the deposition, Hunter Biden also defended putting his dad on speakerphone more than 20 times with foreign associates, saying it was “totally normal for your parents to call you,” according to Greene.
Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz scoffed at that explanation: “It is a mirage to believe that Hunter Biden was engaged in international business. This was a bribe masquerading as an international business transaction. Hunter Biden told us that he joined the Burisma board to counter Russian aggression. I hadn’t heard that one before.”
Greene said the first son described his role with Burisma — which netted him up to $1 million annually from 2014 to 2019 — as necessary “to defend democracy.”
Greene warned Republicans to “get ready” for Democrats to drum up another Russian disinformation hoax related to Hunter Biden and the 2024 election. She explained the potential hoax would be designed to fit the media’s narrative to both attack former President Donald Trump and protect the Biden family:
"I have a prediction that they’re gonna move it on to members of Congress like me and others, Jim Jordan, Jamie Comer, any of us that got hot and heavy on this Ukraine Burisma stuff, that they’re somehow going to say that Republicans are Russian sympathizers. They’re gonna call me that anyway, because I won’t fund the Ukraine war. They’re probably going to accuse us of being Russian sympathizers and falling for Russian disinformation and its election meddling. And then Democratic members of Congress here already saying they will not certify Trump’s election if he wins."
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