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Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Biden family moneyman Eric Schwerin testifies he gave Joe free services while working with Hunter

Biden family associate Eric Schwerin told congressional impeachment investigators Tuesday that he provided free financial services to President Biden during his vice presidency while doing business with his son Hunter.

A source familiar with Schwerin’s testimony said he described performing without charge money-related tasks including bookkeeping, paying bills, and preparing taxes and official financial disclosure forms for the then-VP.

The rarely seen Schwerin didn’t address the press during his trip to Capitol Hill for a closed-door deposition with House members and lawyers looking into alleged corruption in the first family.

Schwerin testified that despite being one of Hunter Biden’s closest associates, he knew little about the details of payments from benefactors in China, Kazakhstan, Romania, Russia and Ukraine, the source said.

However, Schwerin’s testimony still could advance Republican claims that Joe Biden misrepresented his distance from his relatives’ business dealings.

As a candidate in 2019, Biden said: “What I will do is the same thing we did in our administration. There will be an absolute wall between personal and private [business] and the government. There wasn’t any hint of scandal at all when we were there.”

A second person familiar with Schwerin’s remarks said that he insisted he provided his services to Joe Biden as a friend and that the favors were unrelated to his work with Hunter Biden.

Some details of Schwerin’s testimony were not immediately known — such as what he may have said about communications with Joe Biden using email addresses registered to pseudonyms for the then-vice president.

Joe Biden swapped emails at least 54 times with Schwerin during his vice presidency, according to prior disclosures — as then-second son Hunter Biden courted business from countries where his father held sway, such as China and Ukraine.

Some of the emails were sent at roughly the same time that Joe Biden was making official trips to Ukraine as the head of US policy — while Hunter was earning a $1 million salary sitting on the board of natural gas company Burisma Holdings beginning in the spring of 2014

Schwerin was president of Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Partners, which was created in 2009 and served as one vehicle through which Hunter earned foreign income.

Republicans leading the impeachment inquiry were expected to ask Schwerin about whether any foreign funds flowed even indirectly to Joe Biden, as well as about the contents of their emails, which are not fully known.

In a prepared opening statement, Schwerin said that he was “not aware of” Joe Biden receiving foreign money.

“I performed a number of administrative and bookkeeping tasks for then-Vice President Joe Biden related to his household finances. I also helped him and his accountants in their preparation of his taxes and his annual financial disclosure statements,” the prepared statement said.

“In the course of performing these duties, I had the ability to view transactions both into and out of Vice President Biden’s bank accounts while he was Vice President. Based on that insight, I am not aware of any financial transactions or compensation that Vice President Biden received related to business conducted by any of his family members or their associates nor any involvement by him in their businesses.”

Legal experts say that a government official doesn’t necessarily have to receive compensation directly if their relatives were being paid.

Schwerin also handled “almost every aspect” of the financial affairs of Hunter Biden’s family, the first son’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle wrote in her 2022 memoir.

The elder Biden’s links to Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company, include attending an April 2015 dinner in DC with company board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi and Hunter’s associates from Russia and Kazakhstan.

Hunter Biden, joined by Pozharskyi and Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky, also stepped away from a Dubai gathering in December 2015 to “call DC” shortly before one of the then-VP’s trips to Ukraine, former Biden family associate Devon Archer testified in July.

Republicans leading the impeachment inquiry are expected to ask Schwerin about whether any foreign funds flowed to Joe Biden, as well as about the contents of their emails, which are not fully known.

The elder Biden’s links to Burisma include attending an April 2015 dinner in DC with company board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi and Hunter’s associates from Russia and Kazakhstan.

Hunter Biden, joined by Pozharskyi and Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky, also stepped away from a Dubai gathering to “call DC” shortly before one of the then-VP’s trips to Ukraine, former Biden family associate Devon Archer testified in July.

Archer said he understood the comment to mean they were calling Joe Biden.

Zlochevsky allegedly told a paid FBI informant in 2016 that he was “coerced” into paying $10 million in bribes to the Bidens in exchange for the vice president’s help in ousting Ukrainian prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the company for corruption. The allegation has not been proven.

Joe Biden also interacted multiple times with Kyiv’s longtime mayor Vitali Klitschko, who was the “core shareholder” and a participant in a Hunter Biden-chaired subsidiary called Burisma Geothermal, according to records from Hunter’s abandoned laptop that were corroborated to The Post by a former business associate.

Schwerin’s deposition follows last week’s testimony by Biden family associate Rob Walker, who revealed that Joe Biden met in 2017 with Ye Jianming, chairman of CEFC China Energy, which paid Hunter Biden and his uncle James millions of dollars shortly after Joe Biden left office as vice president.

Prior testimony revealed that Joe Biden, despite claiming he “never” discussed business with his son or brother and “did not” interact with their partners, engaged with their foreign associates in most high-profile dealings abroad.

Archer further testified that Joe Biden was on speakerphone during roughly 20 business meetings between his son and foreign associates.

Archer also said the then-VP had coffee during a 2013 trip to Beijing with Jonathan Li, the incoming CEO of BHR Partners — a state-backed Chinese investment fund in which Hunter held a 10% stake through at least 2021. Joe Biden subsequently greeted Li over speakerphone, Archer said, and wrote college recommendation letters for his children.

https://nypost.com/2024/01/30/news/biden-family-moneyman-eric-schwerin-testifies-in-impeachment-inquiry/

Meta Oversight Board Member Says 2020 Election Interference Was ‘Not Enough’

One presidential election cycle after Facebook “reduced” the distribution of The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and suspended the accounts of former President Donald Trump on Facebook and Instagram, a member of Meta’s oversight board says the Big Tech platform “had not done enough” to control users’ speech.

In an interview with Wired published Friday, board member Pamela San Martín claimed that as the tech platform enters 2024, “even though we’re addressing the problems that arose in prior elections as a starting point, it is not enough.”

“Between the U.S. election [in 2020] to the Brazilian election [in 2022], Meta had not done enough to address the potential misuse of its platforms through coordinated campaigns, people organizing, or using bots on the platforms to convey a message to destabilize a country, to create a lack of trust or confidence on electoral processes,” she added.

Really? With the encouragement of intel agencies, Facebook engaged in plenty of election interference in 2020.

On the same day The New York Post published bombshell emails recovered from a laptop Hunter Biden left at a Delaware repair shop, Facebook’s policy communications director Andy Stone tweeted, “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”

NPR admitted “that means the platform’s algorithms won’t place posts linking to the story as highly in people’s news feeds, reducing the number of users who see it.” The platform had also removed a Trump campaign ad earlier that year, and would suspend Trump’s account in January 2021.

When a Republican staff report from the House Oversight Committee and Judiciary Committee described “How Democrats Are Attempting to Sow Uncertainty, Inaccuracy, and Delay in the 2020 Election,” another staff report weeks later notes Facebook “flagged the Judiciary Committee Republicans’ post about the report, and linked to a website that Facebook describes as containing ‘official election resources.'” However, as the latter report insisted, “the content Facebook presents as ‘official’ is not always neutral. Instead it amplifies certain points of view and undermines others.”

Ahead of the 2020 election, Facebook also promised to ban political ads that it deemed to be making false claims about such things as “voter fraud.”

Two months before the election, bemoaning North Carolina’s mail-in voting systems, Trump said absentee voters were “going to have to go and check their vote by going to the poll and voting that way,” out of a concern that absentee votes might not be tabulated. “Let them send it in and let them go vote, and if the system is as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote,” Trump said.

Soon after, Facebook told USA Today “that it will remove any videos supporting the president’s suggestion, as well as any videos without captions or context.” The Big Tech platform would, however, allow posts from “those who share the video criticizing the suggestion or noting that voting twice is illegal.”

Aside from meddling with election-related content to control voters’ access to information, Facebook also spent the months and years leading up to the election censoring conservative voices, including the sitting president.

In August 2020, Facebook took down a clip Trump posted of himself saying children were “almost immune from this disease,” speaking about Covid-19. But it was true that children were far less likely to become seriously sick from Covid, with the Centers for Disease Control noting that pediatric hospitalizations were “much lower” for Covid than for the regular flu.

After race riots ravaged the country in summer 2020, Facebook nuked any “praise and support” or donation page links for Kyle Rittenhouse, the young man who shot three men in what a jury agreed was self-defense in Wisconsin.

Since then, the platform has worked with the Biden White House to censor the administration’s dissenters. Facebook removed posts sharing heterodox beliefs about Covid-19 because, as a Facebook VP put it in an internal email, “we were under pressure from the administration and others to do more.” The platform also nuked a page belonging to an organization run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running for president against Biden.

But San Martín told Wired for last week’s story that Facebook needs to do more. “Social media platforms need to learn from past mistakes to be able to address them better this year,” she said, acknowledging that since 2020 “we’ve seen an advance in Meta using more tools to address election-related issues.”

She also listed “election-specific initiatives” — read: censorship techniques — that Meta has tested out “in different countries.” These have included “working with electoral authorities, adding labels to posts that are related to elections, directing people to reliable information, prohibiting paid advertisement when it calls into question the legitimacy of elections, and implementing WhatsApp forward limits,” San Martín casually explained to Wired.

San Martín acknowledged “how [Meta’s] own algorithms, their own newsfeeds, their own recommendation systems, their own political ads can play a part” in what she euphemistically called “protection” of “electoral processes.” And as she told Wired, it’s something she wants to see more of, not less.

Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women's Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_etreynolds.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/31/a-starting-point-meta-oversight-board-member-says-2020-election-interference-was-not-enough/

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Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Biden family moneyman Eric Schwerin testifies he gave Joe free services while working with Hunter

Meta Oversight Board Member Says 2020 Election Interference Was ‘Not Enough’

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