England’s Daily Mail on Monday outlined new details involving yet another corrupt European oligarch who leveraged Hunter Biden‘s political connections during the Obama administration, when his father—current President Joe Biden—was the vice president.
The newspaper revealed “the extensive propaganda and persuasion campaign planned by Hunter” on behalf of Romanian real-estate tycoon Gabriel Popoviciu after he was convicted in a 2016 bribery scandal.
In a June 2016 letter, Hunter even solicited the support of former Clinton-era FBI director Louis Freeh, hoping that the private-practice consultant might still be able to deploy his Justice Department contacts on behalf of Popoviciu.
“I’ve become close to the client personally and he is in my estimation a very good man that’s being very badly treated by a suspect Romanian justice system,” Hunter wrote in the letter.
He also floated the possibility of making it worth Freeh’s while. “Time is of the essence and my client has never balked at bringing whatever team it takes together at whatever cost to obtain justice.”
Freeh replied by dropping the names of two attorneys he had been working closely with and listing times that the two could chat further.
While the work would not, on its face, have been illegal or unethical, efforts by either man to influence government actions on behalf of their client would have potentially violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The FARA law also regulates publicity campaigns, such as a pitch that Hunter and his business associates allegedly made to the Wall Street Journal on behalf of Popoviciu.
“We should put together a persuasive deck with all the procedural and substantive defects in the indictment / case against Gabs [Popoviciu],” wrote Michael Gottlieb, a fellow attorney at the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm where Hunter worked.
“[W]e should also probably put together the start of what would be a press strategy,” Gottlieb added. “And we’ll want to line up the big names to bring over.”
According to the Daily Mail, Hunter appears to have been brought on as a last-minute heavy hitter to pull strings with Popoviciu on the cusp of conviction in a Romanian court.
Other legal advisers working on the case boasted of personal ties to the then-newly appointed US ambassador to Romania, Hans Klemm.
“One of my partners is best friends with the newly appointed Ambassador to Romania,” firm partner Chris Boies wrote in an email.
The new development comes on the heels of recent reports that the DOJ already is investigating the US lobbying efforts made by Blue Star Strategies on behalf of Ukrainian energy company Burisma during the same time span.
Hunter reportedly received a million dollars annually for his ‘consulting’ work as a board member with Burisma.
That work involved having Hunter’s then-vice-president father intervene in a Ukrainian corruption probe of the company’s CEO, Mykola Zlochevsky, by threatening to withhold a billion-dollar US loan if the country’s top prosecutor was not fired.
Blue Star also milked the company’s Hunter Biden connection in setting up an influence campaign to be granted meetings with top-level officials at the Obama State Department.
But DOJ officials say the lobbyists failed to register as foreign agents and never mentioned the Burisma work when dealing with US agencies overseeing their own ethical practices.
The question over whether Hunter Biden’s conflicts of interest swayed US foreign policy became the subject of then-President Donald Trump’s call for Ukraine to reopen its corruption investigation in 2019.
However, using a deep-state whistleblower embedded in the White House, corrupt House Democrats flipped the script, claiming Trump had sought a quid pro quo for his own personal benefit, despite Biden having done precisely that.
Many of the exculpatory details for Trump that the House actively sought to suppress in its sham impeachment hearing would subsequently be corroborated by the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which the FBI had in its possession at the time.
Emails showed that on business deals with several foreign entities, including China and Ukraine, Hunter sought to negotiate a 10% profit-sharing cut for “the big guy,” later confirmed to be Joe Biden.
The bombshell discovery of the laptop prompted Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, a top FARA advocate in the Senate, to accuse several members from the Biden family business syndicate of being in violation over a deal with a leading Chinese energy company, CEFC.
“When the available evidence is taken as a whole, it is clear that CEFC intended to make inroads in the United States for the purpose of expanding its business and used Hunter Biden and his business associates to help effectuate that intent,” Grassley wrote in a letter to then-Attorney General William Barr.
“… Accordingly, the actions by Hunter Biden and James Biden on behalf of CEFC … potentially make them agents of the Chinese government for purposes of longstanding public disclosure laws,” he said.
