Only Lunden Roberts's Attorneys Are Asking The Right Questions

The conventional view of the Biden family finances we've had from the quasi-investigative right-wing press, along with limited information from the Comer committee, has been that Hunter is the business mind and the bagman who collects payments from assorted foreign businessmen, gangsters, and wannabes and funnels them into a general Biden family fund that supports somewhere between nine and 12 parasitic family members with assorted other cronies and retainers. It's alleged that part of the scheme is "10% to the big guy", based on a cryptic reference in an e-mail on the Hunter laptop. In part, this is also a view that Hunter himself promotes among some in the family, including his uncle James and daugther Naomi, also based on e-mails in the laptop.

But let's take a 30,000-foot look at Hunter's actual career. Every indication is that he never had much business or financial acumen, and in fact he himself led a parasitic lifestyle based on his position as son of a US senator until Joe became vice president. His most visible job before that was on the Amtrak board of directors, for which it was acknowledged at the time that he had no qualifications. He was nominated by Dubya in 2006 as part of some kind of deal, and he resigned in 2009 after Joe was elected vice president. This site estimates his salary as an Amtrak director at $123,704 per year.

The best authority we have on Hunter's finances during this period and earlier in his career is his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, who was interviewed extensively during the release of her tell-all, If We Break. By the time of their divorce in 2016, she wrote,

Both our houses had a double mortgage and no equity. We had credit card debt and medical bills. We were in terrible financial shape. The sheer amount of our debt overwhelmed me. We owed as much for both houses as when we’d bought them. We were underwater.

So throughout this period, Hunter's earlier jobs at investment banks and lobbying firms, followed by his stint on the Amtrak board, and then the various deals and partnerships he formed after leaving Amtrak like Rosemont Seneca and BHR Partners, never paid his own bills. At the same time, the few more or less reputable people he worked with like Christopher Heinz wound up breaking with him -- Heinz did so after Hunter joined the Burisma board in 2014. As far as we can tell, the Burisma board was Hunter's peak. It paid him $83,333 a month until Joe left the vice presidency in 2017, when it was cut to $41,500 per month. But by my own estimate on Monday, even the million dollars a year he was said to be earning at his peak there couldn't have covered his extravagant expenses.

Hunter left the Burisma board in 2019, which was around the time the Bidens staged a family intervention over Hunter's lifestyle, which in turn was in anticipation of Joe announcing his run for president. There are numerous references on Hunter's laptop in January of that year to Joe assuming hundreds of thousands of dollars of Hunter's debts and meeting other shortfalls, again presumably to clean things up in anticipation of a presidentiual campaign.

So as of 2019, Hunter had left Burisma, but as was his pattern throughout his life, he was heavily in debt. His various other businesses and partnerships had collapsed or gone inactive by then as well. By that March, his employees were dunning him for unpaid wages. The terms of his divorce from Kathleen apparently included $37,000 a month in alimony, while his 2020 paternity settlement with Lunden Roberts was another $20,000 a month.

But in May 2019, he married Melissa Cohen, a "documentary filmmaker" with no income of her own but an apparent jet-set lifestyle; they had a child in 2020.

So every indication is that after 2019, although Joe had assumed his prior debts and shortfalls, Hunter had no regular income, yet nowithstanding any other obligations, he had $57,000 a month in alimony and child support, which comes to $684,000 per year. He is said to have sold some paintings via a gallery in several tranches. According to the New York Post,

Hunter, 52, has asked as much as $500,000 for his beginner works. He earned at least $375,000 in 2021 for five prints at a Hollywood art show attended by his father’s embattled nominee to be ambassador to India, then-Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and it’s unclear how many additional sales he may have made.

But as with all things Hunter, whatever he may have made selling paintings won't ever cover his actual expenses. This brings us to an obvious question: who is sustaining his lifestyle? But the only people who are seriously asking it are Lunden Roberts's attorneys:

Judge Holly Lodge Meyer, who is handling Hunter Biden’s child support case in Arkansas, issued an order Monday saying President Joe Biden’s son must appear on July 10 at the Independence County Courthouse in Batesville to explain “why he should not be held in contempt” after lawyers for Lunden Alexis Roberts, the mother of Hunter Biden’s child, argued that Hunter Biden was ignoring the judge’s May order to hand over information on his finances.

. . . Hunter Biden has been ordered to answer inquiries about the current state of his finances, including all of his investments, his art sales, and other relevant financial transactions.

Hunter Biden’s 10% ownership stake in a Chinese government-linked investment firm has apparently been transferred to his Hollywood lawyer “sugar brother,” who paid off millions of dollars of Hunter Biden's back taxes, company records indicate.

But if we add over half a million a year in alimony and child support payments to what are now legal bills that must be in the range of a million dollars a month, plus the expenses of his new marriage and child, plus whatever else he's spending on whatever, just selling some paintings won't cover it.

Hunter is continuing to incur millions of dollars in expenses with no comparable income to cover them -- which of course has been his pattern all along. But these are non-trivial amounts, millions upon millions over a period of seveal years -- and this assumes Hunter is currently clean and sober. Where is this money coming from? Kevin Morris? I don't think so. I'll get into Kevin in more depth tomorrow.

But the one thing we can rely on is that Hunter, an addict who can never be trusted with money under any circumstances, can't possibly ever have been the guy who's been funding the Biden family lifestyle. This amounts to enormous sums that must be coming from someplace else.