Then-Vice President Joe Biden’s office exchanged 19,335 emails with Hunter Biden’s investment firm Rosemont Seneca, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed Tuesday.
The emails call into question President Biden’s repeated claims that he never discussed business with his son. Former Hunter Biden business associate Devon Archer previously testified that then–vice president Biden joined at least 20 phone calls and/or in-person meetings with Hunter’s foreign business associates during their time working together. He explained that access to the vice president served as the selling point of the Biden “brand” that allowed he and Hunter several lucrative financial opportunities, including joining the board of Burisma.
At the time, Burisma’s founder and CEO Mykola Zlochevsky was being investigated by Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, whom the elder Biden later bragged about having fired.
The Biden family and its business associates received millions of dollars from oligarchs in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine while Joe Biden was vice president, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee.
The committee says it has identified more than $20 million in payments from foreign sources to the Biden family and their business associates. Those foreign sources include Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, China and Romania.
The foreign funds were sent to accounts tied to Archer that used the Rosemont Seneca name and were then doled out in incremental payments to Hunter Biden, the records show, in what the committee suggests was an attempt to hide the source and size of the payments.
The Biden family and its business associates created a complicated web of more than 20 companies, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee — a system, GOP lawmakers say, that was meant to conceal money received from foreign nationals. At least nine Biden family members received payments, according to committee chairman James Comer, including Hunter Biden and James Biden.
America First Legal, which is headed by former Trump advisor Stephen Miller, filed three FOIA requests to the National Archives and Records Information in August 2022 asking for records related to Hunter Biden and James Biden’s business dealings.
NARA initially estimated that the size of the request would require seven years of processing time at a rate of 1,250 pages per month, leading AFL to file a lawsuit to enforce its records request.
AFL and NARA filed a joint status report on Friday in the case. The report revealed that then-Vice President Biden’s office also exchanged 4,243 emails with Hunter Biden and another 1,751 emails with then-VP Biden’s brother, Jim Biden.
The update comes one month after House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) sent a letter to NARA on requesting “unrestricted special access” to communications between the office of then–vice president Joe Biden and Hunter Biden or his business associates.
The letter requests unredacted copies of the documents included in NARA’s “Records on Hunter Biden, James Biden, and Their Foreign Business Dealings” file.
Among the requested documents is a December 4, 2015, email in which longtime Biden family business associate Eric Schwerin sent quotes to Biden’s then–communications director Kate Bedingfield that he said the White House should use in response to media outreach regarding Hunter Biden’s role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Bedingfield responded hours after Schwerin’s email was sent saying, “VP signed off on this.”
“The timing of this email traffic is concerning to the Committee,” Comer writes in the letter, obtained by National Review. “According to Devon Archer (another longtime Biden family business associate), after a Burisma board of directors meeting in Dubai—on the evening of December 4, 2015 (midday in Washington, D.C.)—Hunter Biden ‘called D.C.’ to discuss pressure that Burisma asked him to relieve.”
Schwerin formerly served as the managing director of Rosemont Seneca Advisors, a now-defunct financial advisory firm which Hunter Biden co-founded. Schwerin also worked in Hunter’s lobbying shop Oldaker, Biden & Belair from 2002 to 2008, according to financial disclosure forms. He visited the White House and the Naval Observatory at least 36 times while Biden was serving as vice president, Fox News reported.
Emails found on Hunter’s abandoned laptop and reported by the New York Post show that Schwerin was deeply involved in the Biden family’s finances, often moving money around for Hunter and his father.