Margot Cleveland notes that, at Hunter Biden’s abortive plea hearing, both the defendant (under oath) and the Biden Justice Department claimed, falsely, that payments made to Hunter by Patrick Ho (“the f***ing spy chief of China,” as Hunter described him) were legal fees paid to Hunter’s law firm — when those payments were neither legal fees nor paid to his law firm. Recall that falsely characterizing payments as legal fees is exactly the thing for which Alvin Bragg has indicted Donald Trump.
As Cleveland explains:
First, there’s the problem that the $1 million payment on March 22, 2018, was made not to Hunter Biden’s law firm, Owasco PC, but to Owasco LLC. And if you are going to pay $1 million for legal representation, you kinda want to pay the law firm supposedly providing those services.
Second, not only did Ho not pay Hunter’s law firm, Owasco PC, Ho didn’t even pay Owasco LLC. Rather, Ho paid Hudson West III LLC $1 million on Nov. 2, 2017 — mere weeks before federal prosecutors charged Ho with bribing foreign officials to advantage the Chinese communist energy company CEFC. Then on March 22, 2018, Hudson West III LLC transferred that $1 million to Owasco LLC with a notation that it was for “Dr Patrick Ho Chi Ping Representation.”
Hunter blames the indirect routing on mistaken wire instructions, but the routing of the payment is a smaller matter than what it was payment for:
Then there is the Attorney Engagement Letter reportedly recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop, dated September 2017, between Patrick Ho and Hunter Biden, which provided for a $1 million retainer for legal representation. Significantly, this agreement was not entered into between Ho and any of the Owasco entities, but with Hunter Biden personally. Yet on Wednesday, Biden told Judge Noreika his law firm was doing the work for Ho. But what law firm that was, Biden seemed not to know. Of course, Hunter didn’t know because no “legal” representation was provided to Ho and none was expected.
Ho was actually represented in court by other attorneys when he was prosecuted (and convicted of bribery and money-laundering, which included offering to “partner” with the “family businesses” of relatives of the president of Uganda), but what he wanted out of paying Hunter can be surmised from the fact that, “when Ho was arrested, his first call was to Jim Biden” — Joe’s businessman and fixer brother.
When Donald Trump mischaracterizes payments as legal fees, he gets indicted. Is it okay when the United States Department of Justice does the same thing?