Hunter Biden investigation: Direct payment to Joe Biden renews scrutiny of shady loans

A bank record revealing James Biden’s direct payment to his brother, President Joe Biden, has renewed scrutiny of the controversial business deal from which the money originated.

It has also focused attention on a pattern that investigators have uncovered throughout their inquiry into Biden family business dealings: various sources of income classified as loans, with little evidence that family members intended to pay them back.

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House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) demanded proof on Thursday that the $200,000 payment James Biden sent his brother was, in fact, to repay a loan, as writing on the memo line of the 2018 check indicated.

“If Joe Biden did personally loan James Biden an amount that was later repaid by the $200,000 check, please provide the loan documents, including the loan payment, loan agreement, and any other supporting loan documentation,” Comer wrote in a letter to White House counsel Edward Siskel on Thursday.

James Biden sent the $200,000 payment to his brother the same day in March 2018 that he received $200,000 from Americore, a rural hospital operating company. That company later went bankrupt and sued James Biden over wire transfers it had sent him in 2018, claiming he misled the company into paying him $600,000 he had listed as loans.

“Defendant never repaid the Loans to Americore Health, including during the time that Debtors were strapped for cash,” Americore’s legal team complained in a July 2022 document in the lawsuit it filed against James Biden.

James Biden eventually settled the lawsuit by paying back a little more than half of what Americore said it loaned him.

Two other healthcare companies sued James Biden and other individuals associated with Americore over what they saw as alleged fraud.

The two healthcare companies said James Biden persuaded them to give up their business plans and loan him money on the promise that his brother, the former vice president, would help grow their business and that political connections would help bring in investments from Turkey. Neither happened. Those two companies thought they were in talks to merge with Americore, as James Biden had shown them an Americore business card with his name on it.

A merger did not occur.

The Americore mess was not the only time James Biden or an associate raked in large sums of money they claimed to be borrowing. The blurry lines between loans and income have run throughout the Biden family business dealings.

Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, allegedly listed all his income from Ukrainian energy company Burisma as loans in 2014, avoiding paying taxes on any of it, according to two IRS whistleblowers who spoke to Congress in May. He earned $83,000 per month from Burisma at the time.

Burisma would send Hunter Biden’s payments to a company controlled by Hunter Biden’s friend, who then passed the money along to Hunter Biden as a loan. That arrangement continued until one of Hunter Biden’s then-business partners, Eric Schwerin, became aware of the situation and put an end to it.

Joseph Ziegler, one of the two IRS whistleblowers, told Congress that investigators focused on the Burisma loans during their yearslong investigation of Hunter Biden’s finances.

“You can’t loan yourself your own money,” Ziegler told the House Ways and Means Committee.

In 2017, a Chinese energy conglomerate, CEFC, gave companies owned by Hunter and James Biden, along with their business partners, a $5 million forgivable loan. Multiple witnesses have said Joe Biden was discussed as a potential shareholder in the deal they were attempting to forge with CEFC.

Hunter Biden also attempted to claim money from a company created to facilitate the Chinese partnership, Hudson West III, as a loan, according to Ziegler’s testimony. James Biden also received money from Hudson West III, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee.

“The money that he earned from Hudson West III, he tried to say that that was a loan. Same thing we have all going along back to Burisma — I’m loaning from my own capital in the company — even though he didn’t put any capital in the Hudson West III. It was zero,” Ziegler said. “So he was trying to say that it was a loan. But the accountants were so good that they really dug into it, and they were like: No, no, no, you can’t deduct this — or you can’t take this as a loan on your tax return.”

James Biden told the FBI and IRS in an interview last year that Hunter Biden had never mentioned that he considered the Hudson West III income a loan and said he assumed the money his nephew received from the company as compensation.

Hunter Biden has also claimed the roughly $2 million a friend, lawyer Kevin Morris, paid to the IRS to relieve his tax burden was a loan.

Classifying the 2020 payment from Morris as a loan prevented Hunter Biden from having to pay taxes on the money, and it helped eliminate a potential political liability during Joe Biden’s presidential campaign by settling Hunter Biden’s tax debt.

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FBI and IRS investigators discussed the possibility of investigating Morris’s tax payment as a campaign finance violation with prosecutors last year, given that the payment likely spared Joe Biden embarrassment on the campaign trail by allowing his son to avoid potentially more serious tax charges.

But Assistant United States Attorney Lesley Wolf, a top prosecutor on the case, prevented the investigative team from looking into the campaign finance allegation, according to IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley.