Still obsessed with his electoral defeat, Donald Trump has called on Vladimir Putin to release any information he has on Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
From Mar-a-Lago, the accusations continue. In an interview with conservative show Just The News, Donald Trump again accused Hunter Biden, who is under investigation in Delaware over his ‘tax affairs’, of taking money of the widow of the former mayor of Moscow, calling on Vladimir Putin to “publish” any information on the subject: “She gave the Bidens, the two, 3.5 million dollars, that’s a lot of money. She gave him $3.5 million, so I think Putin knows the answer to that question. I think he should post it.”
He thus repeats information taken from an investigation by Republican senators, published in September 2020, which focused in particular on the role played by Hunter Biden within the Ukrainian gas group Burisma Holdings, of which he joined the board of directors in 2014. before resigning in April 2019, and the potential consequences of Hunter Biden’s overseas business on the policies of his father, then vice president. The investigation had revealed that Elena Baturina, businesswoman and widow of Yury Luzhkov – with whom Donald Trump himself tried unsuccessfully to do business in the 1990s – would have paid 3.5 million dollars to Rosemont Seneca Thornton in 2014 for consulting services. Hunter Biden’s lawyer had denied any link with his client: according to him, the son of the American president is co-founder of an investment company called Rosemont Seneca Advisors, but which would have no link with the company mentioned above.
Investigation : Donald Trump in a nest of spies
The call from the foot of the former American president to Vladimir Putin comes a month after Donald Trump had praised his strategy against Ukraine: “Yesterday I saw a TV screen and I said: ‘It’ is genius.” Putin declares a large part of Ukraine independent. Oh, it’s wonderful,” he said during the podcast recorded with the two conservative hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, referring to Moscow’s recognition of the independence of the self-proclaimed republics of Lugansk and Donetsk. The billionaire had continued to praise the strategy of Vladimir Putin, “a guy who is very clever” whom he knows “very, very well”: “I said: ‘How brilliant.’ He’s going to go there and keep the peace there… We could use that on our southern border,” he imagined, still refusing to admit the legality of Joe Biden’s election. “There was a rigged election and what went wrong was a candidate who shouldn’t be there and a man who has no idea what he’s doing,” he said, assuring that “it doesn’t would have ever happened with us if I had been in charge, unimaginable”.
An appeal to Russia against Hillary Clinton
This is not the first time that Donald Trump has turned to Russia for compromising information on his political opponents. In July 2016, he referred to Hillary Clinton’s emails deleted after using a private server when she was Secretary of State: “I’ll tell you something, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope that you can find the 30,000 missing emails. I think you will probably be greatly thanked by our media.” “This must be the first time a presidential candidate has actively asked a foreign power to spy on his political opponent. This is not an exaggeration, these are the facts. It went from a subject of curiosity to a political question then to a subject of national security”, thundered the political adviser to the Clinton campaign, Jake Sullivan, current national security adviser to the Biden administration.
This obsession with foreign affairs by Hunter Biden was the cause of Donald Trump’s second impeachment. In July 2019, he had discussed with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, elected a few months earlier, the opening of an investigation in Ukraine from which he hoped to draw compromising elements against Hunter Biden. The tone of the billionaire, who had suspended American financial aid to Ukraine, had attracted the attention of Alexander Vindman, lieutenant-colonel of the American army, then director of European Affairs at the National Security Council, who had raised the alert internally. “I was worried about the repercussions on the American support of the American government for Ukraine,” he told the representatives, adding that he “felt it was not appropriate” from Donald Trump “ to require a foreign government to investigate an American citizen”.
Donald Trump had, for his part, sworn that the call to his Ukrainian counterpart was “perfect” despite suspicions of setting up a parallel diplomacy with his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, whose two former collaborators were indicted for breach of campaign laws. He had been impeached by the House of Representatives for “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress”, then acquitted by the Republican-majority Senate.