NY Times SUES the State Department for Hunter Biden records and emails

The New York Times has sued the State Department for allegedly dragging its feet in handing over emails from Romanian embassy officials connected to and his famed former business associate Tony Bobulinski. 

The lawsuit, filed Monday in Manhattan federal court, seeks emails dating 2015 to 2019. The Times alleges that the State Department is failing to address its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in a timely manner. When the Times asked wh was serving as vice president for two of the years the emails cover, 2015-2016. 

Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets initially scoffed at a New York Post report about a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden that indicated he had introduced Ukrainian energy company executives to his father while he was vice president. 

They were silent when DailyMail.com obtained information from the laptop revealing that Hunter Biden used the ‘N-word’ repeatedly in text messages  and may have accidentally overpaid a prostitute $25,000 from an account linked to his dad. 

Twitter blocked users from sharing the New York Post report at the time it was first reported, as the social media platform had written it off as misinformation 

Hunter Biden was hired by a Romanian real estate tycoon later convicted of bribery in 2016. 

Gabriel Popoviciu hired Hunter earlier that year as part of an influence campaign to persuade anti-corruption prosecutors to cut a deal or drop the case, keyboard buttons and even represented him in meetings with top U.S. officials – emails from Hunter’s laptop show.

The request seeks records looking into ‘(1) the possible improper use of federal government resources to assist and advance private business interests with connections to United States government officials and (2) the possible evasion of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by those private business interests, and (3) the non-enforcement of FARA by the federal government in relation to those private business interests.’ 

Emails on Hunter’s abandoned laptop, obtained by DailyMail.com in 2021, reveal how Joe Biden’s son and his colleagues leveraged their US government connections and plotted a propaganda campaign for the grafting Romanian tycoon. 

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), anyone advocating for foreign entities to US government officials, or acting as a publicist for a foreign entity in the US, must add themselves to a Department of Justice public register. 

However, an exception applies for attorneys representing a client in a foreign court case, who are not required to register under FARA.

Emails show Hunter’s colleagues, partners in law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, Christopher Boies and Michael Gottlieb, seeking to set up meetings with the US Ambassador to Romania, after discussing among themselves whether he would intervene in Popoviciu’s case.

Hunter brought in political heavyweight and family friend Louis Freeh, the former director of the FBI, to use his US law enforcement contacts for Popoviciu’s advantage, and was offered a referral fee as a result.

Hunter and his colleagues also discussed a media campaign, including to major U.S. publication the Wall Street Journal, to support their client who was later found guilty of bribery.

None of them were required to register for this work under FARA, due to various exemptions including those for lawyers of foreign defendants.

The FOIA also seeks information on Rudy Giuliani, who was dispatched by former President Trump to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden’s business relationships with Ukraine. 

Giuliani tipped off the New York Post about the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop.  

In 2020, Senate Republicans investigated Hunter Biden’s $50,000-a-month seat on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, then mired in corruption, while his father helped shape policy toward Kiev.

The matter was at the center of former President Trump’s first impeachment – Trump had pressured Ukrainian officials to investigate Hunter’s business dealings. Giving the appearance of a conflict of interest, Hunter’s board seat alarmed some State Department officials. 

The elder Biden leveraged $1 billion in aid to Ukraine to force the country to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma at the time. But the then-vice president’s office said the U.S. wanted Shokin gone because he was not investigating corruption among the country’s politicians. 

But while the investigation found no evidence that Biden as vice president improperly manipulated policy in favor of his son. 

The Republicans’ investigation also found that Hunter had received massive sums of money – some in the seven-figure range – from foreigners in China, Russia and elsewhere while his father was in office. 

Politico reports that the FOIA request threatens to revive an old feud between the Biden White House and the Times’ money and influence reporter Ken Vogel, who has spearheaded coverage of the president’s son. 

Then-deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield wrote to the Times’ executive editor Dean Bacquet and accused Vogel of ‘egregious journalistic malpractice.’  

Then-rapid response director Andrew Bates has also sparred with Vogel on Twitter.  

‘SCOOP from Philadelphia: KEN VOGEL (@kenvogel) is a COWARD,’ Bates tweeted in Feb. 2020.

Bates claimed that Vogel’s report on Hunter Biden’s Ukraine dealings in May 2019 ‘for the first time amplified this misinformation campaign into the mainstream.’ 

Emails found on the laptop pointed to an effort by Hunter to set up a meeting in 2015 between Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser at a Ukrainian energy firm. The FBI had since seized the laptop from the Delaware computer repair shop owner, who says Hunter dropped it off to him in 2019 and never came to retrieve it. 

In an article on reporting on the Federal Election Commission’s decision that Twitter had not violated election law in restricting sharing of the Post piece, the Times initially called the Post report ‘unsubstantiated.’ Later in the day, the September 2021 report was quietly updated to remove the word ‘unsubstantiated.’ 

The Biden campaign at the time denied the meeting between the then-candidate and Ukrainian officials ever took place, saying it was not on his official calendar. 

Meanwhile, mainstream left-leaning media outlets were silent when Dailymail.com revealed text messages, exchanged in late 2018 and 2019, recovered from Hunter’s laptop showing him repeatedly using the n-word in conversations with his white lawyer George Messires. 

The salacious and embarrassing texts were revealed in June 2021.  

The president’s son joked in a January 2019 text to corporate attorney George Mesires about a ‘big penis’, and said to the lawyer: ‘I only love you because you’re black’ and ‘true dat n***a’.

In another text a month earlier he wrote to the Chicago lawyer saying: ‘how much money do I owe you. Becaause (sic) n***a you better not be charging me Hennessy rates.’

Mesires replied: ‘That made me snarf my coffee.’

Hunter added: ‘That’s what im saying ni…’, cutting off the racial slur mid-word, then texted a picture to Mesires.

The picture was not downloaded on Hunter’s laptop, from which the text exchange was recovered by DailyMail.com.

But Mesires replied: ‘Why are you so tan?’

‘I’m sorry for sexting you accidentally that was meant for another friend named Georgia,’ Hunter replied.

Liberal-leaning media outlets were again silent when texts obtained by DailyMail.com and the New York Post revealed that Hunter had allegedly overpaid an escort by $25,000 during a drug-filled bender at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, from which texts show he was later banned for drug use after the hotel found a whole in the wall of a room where he had stayed. Secret Service agents showed up at his door to tell him the card he’d used was linked to his father, according to the texts. 

The United States’ most popular left-leaning publications and news networks – including The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC – made no mention of the story in the days after it was broken by the Post, and confirmed by DailyMail.com.