Ron Klain Reportedly Asked Hunter Biden's Help to Raise Funds for His Father's VP Residence in 2012

His father, US President Joe Biden, claimed that he and his son never mixed Hunter's business with politics. However, the files obtained from a laptop, which had presumably belonged to Hunter, suggest that it is not entirely true.

Hunter Biden helped Ron Klain, the former White House chief of staff of then vice president Joe Biden, in September 2012 to raise more than $20,000 for the Vice-President's Residence Foundation (VPRF) in what Klain described a "low, low key" act, Fox News has reported citing emails of the president's son.

The VPRF itself is a non-profit, that manages preservation and refurnishing of the vice-presidential residence in the grounds of the US Naval Observatory.

The unusual "fundraiser" was reportedly solicited by Klain - who led the VPRF at the time - because the Foundation was at risk of losing its "public charity" status as it had been almost five years since it raised money. And so he asked Hunter Biden to help "tackle a piece of unpleasant business":

"It's not much – we need to raise a total of $20,000 – so I'm hitting up a few very close friends on a very confidential basis to write cheques of $2,000 each. We need to keep this low, low key, because raising money for the Residence now is bad PR – but it has to be done," Klain reportedly explained in one of the emails.

With 2012 being the re-election year for the Obama-Biden administration, Klain wanted to hold the event after all votes were cast, according to emails, but urgently needed formally to get $20,000 of donations. The VPRF did gather the required funds in a hush-hush fundraiser, the tax forms obtained by the Fox show, but the way the money was gathered remains uncertain.

The emails showed that Hunter Biden referred Klain's request to his business associate Eric Schwerin, who wondered whether they could use Hunter's law firm, Owasco PC, to write a corporate cheque and close the issue with the VPRF. It is unclear, however, whether Biden ended up using Owasco PC funds in this endeavour.

Hunter Biden is at present under a federal investigation over suspected violation of money-laundering laws and tax evasion in his business dealings with foreign partners. The details of the probe are unavailable, but the emails extracted from the alleged laptop of Hunter Biden and exposed by the New York Post in 2020, suggest that the president's son struck a shady deal with a Chinese businessman allegedly tied to the Communist Party of China. The deal also included a provision that Hunter held a stake in a joint venture for the "Big Guy" – an unidentified persona, who some journalists alleged could be Joe Biden.

There has been no solid proof to link POTUS with his son's business dealings, but enough to question his claims that he never mixed politics with Hunter Biden's foreign ventures. One of the emails from the laptop namely suggested that Hunter organised a meeting between his father and a member of the board of executives of the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, back when Joe Biden was still vice-president.

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