Aug. 4, 2023 - The Tucker Carlson Show
01:03:35
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| So, where are you from? | ||
| And how did you grow up? | ||
| So, from Long Island. | ||
| I was born in Seacliff, Long Island, which is a little Victorian kind of hippie town on the north shore of Long Island. | ||
| Born on the same street as my wife, Dayton Street. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| Yeah, and so for the first three years we were together on the same street. | ||
| I'm a year older, so her mom used to babysit me when I used to eat Cheerios off the floor where she was pregnant with her, which was a pretty funny story. | ||
| And I moved to Rosin Harbor, which was a mile away. | ||
| And then we went to nursery school together, ended up in the North Shore school districts. | ||
| My mom was the art teacher at Glenwood Landing School and went to North Shore High School. | ||
| We were, you know, prom. | ||
| Prom dates, senior year, and then dated for a bit in college, and then reunited after college some years later. | ||
| But Long Island ended up... | ||
| Set that in a socioeconomic context. | ||
| Is that a really rich part of Long Island, or middle class? | ||
| No, we're middle class. | ||
| Very much middle class. | ||
| My dad worked in the city. | ||
| He worked for Levi and Christian Dior in sales. | ||
| And my mom was an art teacher, as I said. | ||
| I actually went, she was my art teacher, K through 6. Wow. | ||
| Yeah, so that was a very normal, very middle class, you know, three-sport athlete, you know, lacrosse, winter track, football, very kind of, even though it's Long Island and close to the city, it's kind of very Americana. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, it is, too. | ||
| You know, surprisingly. | ||
| So then you go to Yale for lacrosse. | ||
| I did. | ||
| Well, I went to Yale for the academics. | ||
| We like to keep that, you know. | ||
| Yes, but lacrosse was a big part of me being admitted, absolutely. | ||
| What did you think of it? | ||
| Was it a different world from the one you were from? | ||
| Yale? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| You know, it's a long time ago to reflect back, but it was certainly, there was a big culture shock, both academically and socially, immediately. | ||
| Like, first weekend of school, so. | ||
| In what way? | ||
| Just, you know, it was, I got to school and, you know, there were, I don't, you know, without naming names, there was, I was, you know, at the first week at a school, I wasn't in New Haven, but out in the Cape with, you know, folks that the, you know, highways in New York were named after and, you know, large condiments and tires and stuff like that. | ||
| Large condiments. | ||
| It was definitely, it was a big culture shock, but I, you know, adapted. | ||
| Pretty quickly from an academic standpoint, the academic rigor was certainly from a public high school in Long Island relative to Taft or Exeter or Andover. | ||
| There was a quick learning curve, but it was attainable. | ||
| And then socially, I think I did a fine job as well, too. | ||
| So, ended up at Yale. | ||
| Went through four years. | ||
| We had a successful lacrosse career there, which was an absolutely incredible experience. | ||
| Kept you in line, kept you in shape. | ||
| Less distracted from everything. | ||
| And graduated. | ||
| A quick stint into your world. | ||
| Ended up working on the Olympics for NBC for Bob Costas. | ||
| That's pretty cool. | ||
| In 96 in Atlanta. | ||
| And then went on to take a job at Citibank. | ||
| So that's where I got my first Asia experience. | ||
| I was fascinated with Vietnam and had studied some contemporary American history in college. | ||
| My dad was a veteran. | ||
| He was a Marine, served in combat on the High Van Pass. | ||
| In Vietnam? | ||
| In Vietnam. | ||
| So he was in Vietnam when he was 23. I had gone on a trip around the world and really just one of the stops was Vietnam. | ||
| Had he told you about it when you were growing up? | ||
| He did. | ||
| We were a little bit irreverent and would tease him about it and get dressed up as fatigues and tell him we're knee-deep in rice paddies. | ||
| Trying to elicit a flashback or something? | ||
| Trying to elicit PTSD, maybe? | ||
| Yeah, we were a little wild, me and my three brothers and sisters. | ||
| He didn't talk about it much, but we tried to bring it up a lot. | ||
| That's pretty funny. | ||
| So you wound up working for Citibank in Vietnam? | ||
| Yeah, I wound up getting a job with Citibank. | ||
| CitiBank in Vietnam. | ||
| I kind of orchestrated it through an uncle that had a relationship at CitiBank. | ||
| And yeah, I ended up getting a management associate job there. | ||
| They'd just opened. | ||
| Doi Moi was kind of underway, which was not necessarily the privatization, but the opening of Vietnam post the war, the conflict, the war of American aggression. | ||
| That's what I've been coached to say if you live in Vietnam for some time. | ||
| So I went there as a management associate. | ||
| I was in Hanoi for a year and then a couple years in Ho Chi Minh City. | ||
| And ended up at CityCorp Asia Capital Limited, where I was in private equity. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Yeah, that was the beginning of it. | ||
| Where did you go after Vietnam? | ||
| After Vietnam, there was a non-profit that had come through to produce a film about Vietnam, which involved a bike ride on mountain bikes from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. | ||
| It was an 18-day ride, 1,200 miles, and we had a production team actually video it. | ||
| They asked me at Citibank to sponsor it, so I wrote a letter to New York and said, can we sponsor this amazing event? | ||
| We've got 100 NVA disabled soldiers, and we've got 100 American veterans, primarily disabled, and we got on bicycles and hand cycles. | ||
| I piloted a blind veteran that had been shot near Quezon. | ||
| And spent 18 days on a bike going over those memories. | ||
| And then, actually, this is how I left Citibank. | ||
| I got a call. | ||
| So this is an amazing experience, yada, yada. | ||
| But I'm sitting at my desk at Citibank in Ho Chi Minh City, or I don't know, I forget what office I was in. | ||
| Got a call and said, you know, we had such a great time with you riding on the bike. | ||
| Would you come back and be a co-executive producer on this film? | ||
| And you could get a job. | ||
| One of the benefactors of the charity was a Goldman guy. | ||
| One was at Equitable Financial at the time. | ||
| And they were both the CEOs or senior partners. | ||
| And they were like, we'll give you a job. | ||
| You have the training at Citi. | ||
| Just produce the movie for us. | ||
| And so I went back and we ended up selling. | ||
| I worked very closely with a great colleague down in Charlotte. | ||
| We sold the film to NBC. Title sponsor. | ||
| We sold it to Reebok as a title sponsor. | ||
| Got Dick Enberg to do the intro. | ||
| Got Bruce Springsteen to donate a song. | ||
| Yeah, shut out the light. | ||
| And it was a great success. | ||
| We won the Emmy in 99. So, daytime outstanding program achievement. | ||
| So, one for one. | ||
| So, you're an Emmy award winner. | ||
| I am, yeah. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| So, what did you do after that? | ||
| So, after that, I ended up going the one... | ||
| Kind of principal at Equitable Financial had moved over to New England Financial. | ||
| So we'd taken a new job as the chairman and CEO of New England Financial. | ||
| I went into this special, you know, strategic, it was a strategic management group. | ||
| And did a little bit of, it was primarily like almost like an in-house management consultant in finance, like across the business. | ||
| They put me on a lot of different special projects. | ||
| And that was, you know, that was my job for the next couple of years. | ||
| We were actually bought by MetLife. | ||
| And so when New England Financial was bought by MetLife, I went down to New York very quickly in that acquisition. | ||
| But my boss, who was the CEO and chairman, became the president of individual life at MetLife, a much bigger organization. | ||
| So it wasn't as interesting an opportunity. | ||
| So I went out and started a technology company with one of the consultants I'd worked with previously, one of the management consultants. | ||
| I think it was at Arthur Anderson. | ||
| And we started a tech company and sold that. | ||
| In 2004, to Coactive Marketing Group, which was a NASDAQ-listed company. | ||
| And then from there, so that was kind of an exit while I was working very closely on the Carry for President campaign. | ||
| So I was a volunteer. | ||
| I was essentially raising capital, organized some different, you know, kind of... | ||
| I guess surrogate tours and bus tours with some celebrities, stuff that's since backfired. | ||
| But, you know, that can't be Italian. | ||
| In 04, it seemed to work. | ||
| And basically was poised through kind of the success that I had in the fundraising that I was going to go and take a job in the White House. | ||
| So I thought I was, you know, going to work in small business or there was some other, you know, there were all the larger kind of... | ||
| I was a baby bundler. | ||
| I think I was identified as in the New York Post at some point. | ||
| But, you know, I ended up, you know, looking at those jobs and looking at, you know, what would you have to do in security clearance and all that. | ||
| Long story short, I had sold... | ||
| Sitara was the name of the company that sold. | ||
| And, you know, poised to do that. | ||
| We thought we were going to win. | ||
| And then, you know, what was it? | ||
| November 3rd, 2004, basically. | ||
| Hung a shingle and said, I need a job. | ||
| Because we lost. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that. | ||
| The part where you lost. | ||
| I was in Boston. | ||
| I think I was crying. | ||
| I was with my wife. | ||
| I remember the hotel looking out at the acceptance stage. | ||
| There was a couple people walking around the stage. | ||
| Drunk people. | ||
| Unexploded fireworks. | ||
| That was an unsuccessful run. | ||
| But I spent a lot of time and put a big effort into it. | ||
| And it was a great experience. | ||
| We thought we were doing a great thing, and unfortunately, it's hard to beat an incumbent. | ||
| So 2004 November, you're married, no job. | ||
| Yep, we're without a job, and I team up with a partner, and we start Rosemont. | ||
| We start Rosemont Capital. | ||
| And Rosemount Capital starts really in the private equity world in something called a fundless sponsor. | ||
| So when you're out and in private equity early, you go out as a fundless sponsor. | ||
| And what that means is you don't have a pool of capital to kind of draw on, but you look for an asset. | ||
| You identify an asset you think is going to be a good private asset that you can either take public or sell to another strategic buyer. | ||
| So that's always kind of like the infancy of a private equity firm. | ||
| Fundless sponsors succeed. | ||
| A lot of fundless sponsors fall by the wayside, and a lot of managers at fundless sponsors just give up. | ||
| But if you have some early successes, you can end up establishing a firm. | ||
| And we ended up establishing a multi-asset class boutique firm that was fairly successful. | ||
| Most of our success was in real estate. | ||
| We ended up buying a real estate management company, and that was called Rosemont Realty. | ||
| We renamed it Rosemont Realty, it was called. | ||
| BGK or some acronym. | ||
| And we ended up putting the Rosemont brand on that after, I would say, five years in business at Rosemont Capital. | ||
| And that business was sold later in 2015. But at our peak, we probably had $3 billion of assets under management, which is kind of like your scorecard as a private equity manager. | ||
| And, you know, we'd done some great things. | ||
| Was Hunter Biden an original partner at Rosemont? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Hunter Biden, I met, really, or I had met him before, but had, like, substantive conversations at a lunch I met in 08, 09. Oh, so you were already... | ||
| It was five years, yeah. | ||
| ...established with the business by then. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Business was quite established. | ||
| Rosemont Seneca Partners came along really at the time that we bought Rosemont Realty, so around 2010. I don't know the exact dates right now. | ||
| It's a while ago. | ||
| But Rosemont, we had initial fundless sponsor deals, so two or three, four deals that we did independently and worked those deals. | ||
| Then we'd raise the fund. | ||
| You know, we had a 2007 vintage fund, which is the year that you started. | ||
| It's very clever. | ||
| We had a 2007 vintage co-investment fund. | ||
| And then we actually raised, out of the financial crisis, we raised the TALF debt fund. | ||
| So reinvesting in asset-backed securities. | ||
| And then we kind of, we did some other, we had some other sub-funds in technology, but ultimately like kind of the big successful. | ||
| A piece of Rosemont ended up being Rosemont Realty, which was this acquisition of BGK. So it sounds like you've got a perfectly self-sustaining business, $3 billion under management. | ||
| That's success, I think. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So how does Hunter Biden get involved, and why? | ||
| So we had this lunch, and a mutual friend, or it wasn't even, I don't know how it was, but an attorney of Hunter's, another attorney of Hunter's, an attorney as well. | ||
| Had introduced us, and we had a lunch, and we always, you know, you're always looking for kind of an edge or an advantage as being a boutique, and certainly $3 billion was good as an AUM number, a scorecard, but in real estate, it's kind of a levered number, so it's a little exaggerated. | ||
| If you're Blackstone 4 and you have $3 billion, you have $3 billion of dry powder. | ||
| If you have a small private equity fund with... | ||
| You know, $3 billion under management. | ||
| A lot of it's real estate. | ||
| It's actually not the actual number you have in dry powder. | ||
| So nuance, but... | ||
| It's very liquid. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's very liquid and you don't have the buying power. | ||
| So you're always looking for an edge. | ||
| You're always looking to expand. | ||
| And we had obviously, you know, we were demystified to Washington just through relationships. | ||
| And Hunter was in a stage where he was transitioning from lobbying to strategic advisory. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| Well, as I understand it, you can probably answer it better than me, given your background. | ||
| There's a distinction, but no difference that I can see. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| One you register for, the other you don't. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And I think that there are some legal, you know, limits around registering when your father's the vice president. | ||
| So I think that was what they ran into. | ||
| But you can and you don't there's certain again, I'm not an expert on it. | ||
| I know that that was I think in Washington, you can't lobby, but you can strategically advise. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| There you go, strategically advise. | ||
| So what was the business that you imagined him helping you with? | ||
| What we really hoped for was introductions to capital, to raise more capital in deal flow. | ||
| So the things that make a private equity fund successful, whether it's in real estate or asset-backed securities, or just going out and looking for operating assets, it's finding unique deals, and then finding the capital to actually invest in those deals and make them worth more money. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But you've got to have the dough. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You've got to have the dough. | ||
| So I think in the back of our minds, The initial strategy was, okay, we can expand our network exponentially. | ||
| Hunter and his strategic team know, you know, tons of folks, and it's a whole new world of, you know, of high net worth individuals, family offices, you know, institutional pension funds, which was a huge one that we thought that we could crack that never materialized. | ||
| And yes, so that was the genesis. | ||
| But on paper, what, you know, what... | ||
| We looked at, it was like, okay, why are you kind of teaming up? | ||
| There was no investment in it. | ||
| It was a, you know, Rosemont Seneca Partners was kind of a dovetail concept. | ||
| It's not like we didn't fund it, nor did they fund it. | ||
| We just said they had their strategic advisory business, we had our private equity business. | ||
| Let's combine forces, expand our network, and maybe get some help. | ||
| Or maybe when we talk to a strategic asset that's, you know, selling... | ||
| We had a company that sold body armor, for instance. | ||
| Maybe we could get a military contract because someone in D.C. knew the Pentagon people. | ||
| I mean, it's just simple kind of connecting the dots. | ||
| It is. | ||
| But if I can just put... | ||
| And this is not a criticism of you because I lived there. | ||
| I didn't see this either. | ||
| But if you're looking for money... | ||
| Washington, logically, would be the last place you would go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, you go to New York, or maybe Los Angeles, or maybe Dubai, or Milan, or places where people do business. | ||
| Washington is not about business, it's about governance. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's kind of weird, isn't it? | ||
| And maybe a sign of deeper corruption, that Washington is like the place you go to raise money. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think where we were in kind of the... | ||
| In the world of private equity, we're a very small private equity fund at the end of the day. | ||
| So the network that you're going to is more family office, high net worth individuals, and then maybe you get a breakthrough with a pension fund. | ||
| So I think the fundraising elements of linking up with Seneca Partners was really that. | ||
| But we took advantage of the strategic advisory work and the network that they had to promote to the assets. | ||
| To promote to the other, you know, to people that we're raising money from, say, oh, listen, we have a D.C. office. | ||
| We know how to operate. | ||
| But can I just ask, this is not related to you, you were not able to get pension money, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| But do you believe, having operated in this world, pension funds are some of the biggest investors in the world? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| They are the institutional investors. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Do you think that political leverage allows people to get investments from pension funds? | ||
| I mean, clearly it does. | ||
| In the world? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Unfortunately, we were not able to. | ||
| No, but you weren't able to. | ||
| But, like, the idea that a pension fund would make an investment decision based on political calculations is, like, the definition of corruption, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, I think there's an entire world and business that's been focused on trying to create those lines of demarcation. | ||
| I mean, it's one of the biggest—I mean, all the pension managers, I mean, it's a whole world to— So it's a bigger discussion. | ||
| But yes, obviously, that would be the ultimate form of corruption. | ||
| So just to sum up what I think we're hearing so far is that you're on a pretty conventional business track. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| You're working for a big bank at first. | ||
| And then you decide to move into this burgeoning private equity world, which really was exploding at the time. | ||
| And then at some point, having gotten the business off the ground and it's succeeding, you look to Washington for opportunities there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you run to Hunter Biden or set up with Hunter Biden? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm set up with Hunter Biden. | ||
| And again, you know, at that time, it seemed like, you know, hindsight's 20-20. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| But it seemed like an opportunity to just broaden our network, broaden our... | ||
| You know, competitive advantage on the deal side by having this, you know, access or regulatory understanding of D.C. is how we properly say it. | ||
| And maybe expanding our, you know, and getting lucky with a pension fund introduction or another, you know, large family, you know, maybe there's a political donor that's a billion dollar family office on the West Coast that Hunter has a relationship with. | ||
| So I thought that that would be, that was enough reason to kind of... | ||
| Not invest in a new company, but just, you know, flirt with a joint venture at the end of the day. | ||
| So, and you're in your early 30s at this point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, early 30s. | |
| You're trying to make your way. | ||
| You wind up, though, with this deal most famously with Burisma. | ||
| Burisma, yes. | ||
| How did that come about? | ||
| So, the Burisma deal came about, initially, the CEO, Zolshevsky, and Vadim... | ||
| I'm going to abuse the name. | ||
| I have it here. | ||
| I've got it right here. | ||
| Why do you say it first? | ||
| I got to put my glasses on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Vadim and Nikolai come through. | ||
| They're in the network. | ||
| Again, you're always expanding your network in raising capital and private equity and work with this group, Tri-Global Group, which... | ||
| Famously also worked with Mayor Giuliani, which was another one of their clients, which we found out later, but it was kind of interesting. | ||
| They had had, on their fundraising list, had Nikolai and Vadim, who were the CEO and the CEO owner and corporate secretary of Burisma, and they'd come through New York. | ||
| Pozharski. | ||
| Yeah, there we go. | ||
| We'll just use Vadim, I think. | ||
| Vadim. | ||
| So they come through New York. | ||
| I was actually on a business trip in Asia. | ||
| And they're taken through and, you know, the Tri-Global Group says we're working on, you know, these things. | ||
| One of the funds that we're marketing is Rosemont Real Estate Acquisition Fund 1, Reef. | ||
| And they show it to them. | ||
| And that's probably, you know, I'll probably get the dates wrong, but that's maybe in the early, you know, the 2012 range. | ||
| Okay, so that's the first context. | ||
| We've got a placement agent. | ||
| Working on Rosemont, they're on commission business with Rosemont Real Estate Acquisition Fund. | ||
| They meet Vadim and Burisma. | ||
| I don't know if they've known each other before, but there's this mini-gark, as we call it. | ||
| And then a mini-gark and Vadim, who's the corporate secretary, they come through, they give them the deck. | ||
| I don't know if they spent any time on it. | ||
| The deck being the marketing presentation for Reap. | ||
| And nothing happens. | ||
| They don't come in as an investor, but they... | ||
| TriGlobal was successful in identifying some investors for us. | ||
| Not Burisma. | ||
| Cut to 2014, and I'm in the midst of a trip to Europe, and we're doing a strategic deal with a large bank there, and I get there late February, early March, and it happens to be the day that Putin invaded Crimea. | ||
| A peaceful invasion of Crimea, as they say. | ||
| And so our deal falls through because there's all these, you know, basically it's like this huge paradigm shift, obviously, after Mindana. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And, you know, everything changed in Europe and it became this, you know, there's this new inflection point of Ukraine and that really started there on those days. | ||
| So needless to say, our strategic deal with the bank. | ||
| Falls through for Rosemount Real Estate Acquisition Fund. | ||
| So we're quickly pivoting because at the same time we're raising for Rosemount Real Estate Acquisition Fund too. | ||
| So I happen to be at a meeting and TriGulliwell says, well, are you still trying to raise capital? | ||
| So would you like to meet with Nikolai Zolchefsky to pitch your wares? | ||
| I bring the deck to him. | ||
| We go through the presentation and he says, You know, interestingly enough, he knows, you know, obviously he's calculating. | ||
| He had made some moves earlier, which I'll tell you about, you know, thinking about Ukraine and the former position that he had. | ||
| So we pitched him back. | ||
| He kind of looks through it. | ||
| And, you know, I remembered he had some, like, crazy watch with, like, a, you know, it was like a Ulysses Nardau with, like, an oil. | ||
| Like, a thing that was ticking. | ||
| Like, the second hand was like one of those oil wells, like, cranking like this. | ||
| Little I know, it was a natural gas rig. | ||
| But it was hard to decipher. | ||
| Anyway, it was quite an impression. | ||
| And I, yeah, so I, so they, he, again, you know, for the second time, kind of ignored the real estate pitch. | ||
| And mentioned in the meeting, he didn't, I mean, he was very... | ||
| But he was obviously not interested in that. | ||
| But, you know, mentioned, he said, you know, President Kwasniewski of Poland has joined my board a couple months ago. | ||
| And do you mind if he gives you a call? | ||
| That was kind of like our departure. | ||
| And I said, yeah, wonderful. | ||
| You know, please follow up and, you know, write a $100 million check into Rosemont Real Estate Acquisition Month 2. So we never had another discussion about that. | ||
| And, you know, the next day... | ||
| Maybe 48 hours later, Kwasniewski and Vadim, who's the corporate secretary, was not at the first meeting, but he was in New York a couple years back. | ||
| Kwasniewski calls me, says, you want to come to Warsaw? | ||
| I want to tell you about Burisma. | ||
| And I kind of had a hint, but I didn't have a... | ||
| Pure picture. | ||
| It was the president of Poland. | ||
| It was the president of Poland, yeah. | ||
| So it was, again, it was... | ||
| So you're just, you happen to be over there trying to raise money for a real estate fund. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| I was there for a big strategic closing that got completely... | ||
| Blown up by world events. | ||
| Exactly, by world events. | ||
| So you're over there to raise money for your real estate fund. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| From the guy from Burisma, because he's just a rich guy looking to diversify. | ||
| They make a ton of money selling natural gas, and they want to invest it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's not interested in your pitch and he says, by the way, since you're here, I'd like you to talk to the president of Poland. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Who then calls you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It was coordinated by Vadim, but yes, eventually we somehow got connected on WhatsApp. | ||
| And yes, calls me, invites me to Poland. | ||
| I was on a lot flight from, or whatever the airline, what the airline's called, I think it's a lot, from JFK within a couple days. | ||
| And I flew directly to Warsaw for 36 hours, sat down with Kwasniewski, and he said, listen, we've got a great opportunity, energy independence for Ukraine. | ||
| This company, Barisma, I joined the board. | ||
| We've looked at your profile. | ||
| I know you've got Rosemont. | ||
| And the idea was to raise outside capital for Burisma. | ||
| So they were like, come join the board. | ||
| It's a very high-paying opportunity. | ||
| We didn't talk details on that in that particular meeting, but he's like, trust me, and there's a chance to build an equity position in this business, and this could be... | ||
| You know, the next Exxon of Ukraine or whatever. | ||
| I think there's some discovery emails that talk about that. | ||
| Well, why wouldn't it have been? | ||
| I mean, it was a real company. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| A real company, incredible management team, you know, new age equipment. | ||
| But why you? | ||
| Why me? | ||
| Because I was a bereber. | ||
| You were a true bereber, huh? | ||
| No, why me? | ||
| No, it's just interesting because you're raising money for a real estate fund. | ||
| But then the guy from the natural gas company says, talk to the president of Poland about joining the board of our natural gas company. | ||
| Was Hunter Biden mentioned at all? | ||
| Hunter Biden was not mentioned, though. | ||
| I mean, I can't deny that they did some research about Rosamund Seneca partners. | ||
| Because it just seems like... | ||
| It was not mentioned to me. | ||
| It's a little... | ||
| I mean, you sound like a very capable business operator, but not... | ||
| Someone who specializes in the energy sector. | ||
| No. | ||
| I've had a diverse portfolio. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, now you know a lot about energy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now I do, yeah. | |
| Yeah, but then... | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| I had one energy investment that we had made in Texas, but that's true. | ||
| I was certainly not, by any stretch of the imagination, an expert in excavating natural gas. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the president of Poland is asking... | ||
| I mean, by the way, lots of weird things happen in life. | ||
| But I... Just kind of suspect that maybe this was all about getting Hunter Biden involved. | ||
| You know, I think that they saw an opportunity to raise... | ||
| I think they thought that I was close enough to political powers that... | ||
| I don't think that was their initial intention, to be completely honest. | ||
| I don't think they were like, I was a mark that they identified and then found Hunter. | ||
| I think it was a little bit more natural than that. | ||
| And at the end of the day... | ||
| You know, similar to kind of what happened in my fate that, you know, be careful what you wish for. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So how did he get involved? | ||
| So it was, as you go on with the progression of the story, so I, he's obviously a partner, and we're always looking to, you know, incent each other and include each other in each of our opportunities. | ||
| And what happened was I came back, I joined the board, or I started the process of joining the board. | ||
| I did join the board. | ||
| I think I was on the board in... | ||
| In March of that year, 2014 was probably my first month there. | ||
| And then I came back and Hunter was of counsel. | ||
| And so what I did is I brought him on board as counsel to legally represent the company and help them basically have a firm in D.C. that would look out for their best interests. | ||
| You know, any kind of geopolitical... | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm calling bullshit on just this one thing, okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So this is a city filled with law firms where every... | |
| Yeah, but Hunter was my partner. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| Just saying, like, this is a city where the number one job for a college-educated Caucasian man is lawyer at a firm. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And a lot of those firms deal with foreign transactions and business and whatever. | ||
| Hunter Biden doesn't have... | ||
| No, no, he's always been in the kind of lobbying world. | ||
| So, I mean, that's an influence play, right? | ||
| There. | ||
| Well, also, I think the firm that he's with counseled was prominent and had a large business in lobbying. | ||
| So I think it made sense. | ||
| And it was also incenting a business partner of ours. | ||
| And it was a business partner of mine. | ||
| I think it was-- Yeah. | ||
| It made all the logic in the world. | ||
| And I think if it stayed like that, it would have been-- History would have been very different. | ||
| So how did he wind up on the board of Burisma? | ||
| So what happened was we quickly developed, there was a team from Burisma that came in to D.C., did some meetings. | ||
| There was kind of a lead practitioner on the law side that was brought in to be like the, you know, Hunter was a relationship manager, and then there was like a lead for what things that needed to be done. | ||
| His relationship manager, is that like a business card title? | ||
| Well, it's generally like of counsel at these law firms. | ||
| It's to make introductions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, of course. | |
| I just love that phrase. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want one of those. | |
| I should have gone to law school. | ||
| I aspire to be there. | ||
| No, it's so great if you can get it. | ||
| Anyway, so no, this is a natural progression. | ||
| So a month or two goes by. | ||
| We're at an economic conference in Italy, Lake Como, which was nice. | ||
| Or if I can say, as your friend, Vadim calls it in a letter I want to ask you about in a minute that we got. | ||
| It was May of 2014. Following our talks during the visit to the Como Lake. | ||
| Yes, the Como Lake. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Lake, yeah, Lake Como. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It was gorgeous, gorgeous weather, and it was May of 2014. And so, you know, that trip to D.C., Vadim had been on that trip. | ||
| I've heard of his other executives there meeting at the law firm in the conference center. | ||
| We're a large conference room and got a lot done and, you know, seemed to be off to a good start. | ||
| They visited us, Vadim and Nikolai visited us at the Villa d'Este at this economic conference. | ||
| And they struck, and Hunter, you know, was of, you know, the relationship manager at the time of council. | ||
| And they, you know, kind of struck up a conversation and Kwasniewski was not there, but on WhatsApp and kind of in the conversation. | ||
| And I think... | ||
| As opposed to me being a mark in an orchestrated effort to get Hunter on board, I think they all of a sudden saw the relationship that I brought by doing this and thought, wait, we can go a step further. | ||
| We've got the president of Poland. | ||
| We've got a couple of finance guys on the board. | ||
| We've got a couple of Ukrainians and Cypriots for regulatory reasons in those domiciles. | ||
| And we can get the son of the vice president on the board. | ||
| They saw that opportunity and they made the offer. | ||
| At the meeting in Lake Como? | ||
| At the meeting in Lake, yes. | ||
| I was not at that meeting, but it was a meeting that was done in a sidebar, and the idea came back, and I think a month later it was... | ||
| So what's so interesting, so here's this letter that I referred to at the Como Lake. | ||
| It is May 12, 2014, 8, 29 a.m., and this is from Vadim Pozharski. | ||
| To you and Hunter, and he goes on, and it's kind of complicated about what, he's talking about corruption in Ukraine, but he gets here, he says, we urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message, signal, et cetera, to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions, et cetera. | ||
| And that's from Vadim. | ||
| So they figured it out right away. | ||
| Absolutely, yes. | ||
| The term signal... | ||
| In every other kind of market or theater or whatever you want to describe, it's a well-used term. | ||
| The U.S. doesn't use it, but it's a very common term to send signals between government and business because government can always shut you down. | ||
| You know, the shakedown kind of... | ||
| I've tried to equate it to something, but you always want to be sending positive signals from that regulatory body, i.e. | ||
| the government, to the business that you're not going to be shut down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I think they're using it in, you know, common term to them and sending back here to us and say, you know... | ||
| Like, oh, I hope we're protected, kind of thing. | ||
| That's the term signal. | ||
| Well, he just flat out says it. | ||
| We urgently need your advice on how you can use your influence. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's all kind of, again, just for context, it's pretty conventional. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think that's what lobbying firms are for. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But then comes the question of General Shokan, the prosecutor. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Tell us, that seems to me, that's when it gets heavy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what was that? | ||
| So Shokin was the, and I'm going to get the dates wrong, but Shokin was the, he was the prosecutor, the head prosecutor in Ukraine. | ||
| And he was taking a close look at Barista. | ||
| So maybe not so different from an attorney general. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But he was taking... | ||
| But much more case active, I think. | ||
| The attorney general is more of like a manager of people that handle cases and they have their independence. | ||
| But this guy's the law. | ||
| He's like the law, yeah. | ||
| So the buck stops with him. | ||
| Hence, the signals are more important in countries outside the United States. | ||
| So Shokin is taking a close look at Burisma. | ||
| There were allegations that some of the deposits or some of the reserves were not... | ||
| You know, authentically acquired or whatever it may be. | ||
| So those were like the, I think that was the genesis of the complaints. | ||
| And there was always, you know, being in Ukraine and being in that part of the world, there was always kind of challenges that they were facing. | ||
| You know, from not being able to get a visa to money being tied up in London. | ||
| And this was just another, you know, in a series of issues that law firms and strategic advisory firms. | ||
| We're hired for to, you know, to handle these kind of things, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, the Shokin case was, he was taking a look at Burisma, and there was a big push by European leaders, the Atlantic Council, et cetera, et cetera, to fire Shokin because he was corrupt. | ||
| Like, it's hard to kind of decipher who's corrupt. | ||
| Can I just ask you just a sidebar? | ||
| Like, why would the Atlantic Council be getting involved? | ||
| In Shokin here. | ||
| I mean, that's... | ||
| I mean, I think... | ||
| I don't know on the Shokin piece. | ||
| I mean, again... | ||
| I mean, this is the lead prosecutor in Ukraine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if Ukraine is actually a country with sovereignty and not just a colony of, say, the neocons in the United States, like, why wouldn't they just let Ukraine deal with their own... | ||
| Like, why would... | ||
| Why would Western powers even get involved in who the chief prosecutor in Ukraine is? | ||
| That's a question that I don't know. | ||
| I couldn't control myself. | ||
| But within Burisma, Shokun was considered a threat to your business. | ||
| Shokun was considered a threat to the business. | ||
| I think anyone in... | ||
| Again, you've got to get the signals to the government. | ||
| I think anyone in government was always a threat and always trying to shake down these businesses that were highly successful and enriching the owners. | ||
| The staff and the board. | ||
| And so at the end of the day, Shokin was taking a look. | ||
| And again, I wasn't involved in Shokin or any of this, but he was a threat. | ||
| He ended up seizing assets of Nikolai, a house, some cars, a couple properties. | ||
| And Nikolai actually never went back to Ukraine after Shokin seized all of his assets. | ||
| And the case was... | ||
| I mean, obviously, this is all out there. | ||
| The case was that there was all this pressure to fire Shokin from the larger community, and then he was fired, and then somehow Burisma was let off the hook. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, that's what the story was. | |
| And Joe Biden, of course, was the driving force behind his firing. | ||
| Yeah, he was involved in that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Involved? | |
| I mean, Biden bragged at Council on Foreign Relations. | ||
| They had a billion dollars coming from IMF, and I said... | ||
| If you don't fire this man, you're not getting a billion dollars. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But on this one, it certainly wasn't made clear to us at the board level that that was a favor to be done. | ||
| The narrative, I don't know the narrative, and I don't want to lead. | ||
| Anyone down that kind of path, that's what happened. | ||
| Because I don't know there. | ||
| But Joe Biden knew that his son was on the board of this company that was being hassled by the prosecutor whose firing he was calling for. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this took place three years after he sent you a letter saying, thanks for all the work you're doing with Hunter. | ||
| So, like, clearly he would know this would benefit the family. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I don't want to get it, but the narrative was that Shoken was already taken care of. | ||
| That was the popular narrative. | ||
| That's the only thing that I... That he was already on his way out. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That was the narrative that was fed to the board. | ||
| Okay, so you were told when Shoken got fired that it had nothing to do with it. | ||
| No, we were told that that was bad and we don't want a new prosecutor Shoken was taken care of. | ||
| So it's very... | ||
| I mean, this is not like... | ||
| You know, checkers. | ||
| Multiple dimensions here. | ||
| This is like Connect Four. | ||
| No, exactly. | ||
| It's like, no, I think in this particular case, it's pretty high stakes and pretty sophisticated. | ||
| So the narrative that I was told was that. | ||
| That's just, you know, I've said it under oath and I'll say it again. | ||
| That was the narrative. | ||
| That was the narrative. | ||
| Did you ever, were you aware, do you acknowledge that Hunter spoke to his dad about Burisma? | ||
| Do I have knowledge? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do you know that Hunter spoke to his dad about Breesman? | ||
| Did you ever see them talk about it, hear them talk about it? | ||
| No, I don't have knowledge of that, though I'd assume it. | ||
| You would assume it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I would assume it in a general sense of travel and that kind of thing. | ||
| But like I've told a lot of people in the past, there was not business content conversations. | ||
| It was the... | ||
| The idea of signals and influence, the prize is enough in speaking or hearing or knowing that you have that proximity to power. | ||
| No one is so unsophisticated that's been in politics for 50 years that Hunter is going to talk about the last quarter's how many billion cubic meters of gas we pumped out of there. | ||
| So it's just, I think a lot of the narrative gets caught up on, you know... | ||
| You know, over-speculation of these conspiracy theories that are just not true. | ||
| That's not the way it actually works. | ||
| It just doesn't work like that. | ||
| So it's enough to be sitting in a meal at Lake Como with your new Ukrainian friends, and while your dad happens to call, let's put him on speaker. | ||
| That would be, I think that's enough. | ||
| That's the second most powerful man in the world. | ||
| It's just how the world works. | ||
| So there's been a lot of effort on the part of Republicans to prove money transfers from Hunter to Joe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then there's the other brother, Jimmy, who I'm going to ask about in a minute. | ||
| And so far there are hints of it, but we haven't seen the direct transfer. | ||
| But did you ever wonder when you were in the Biden orbit, like, how do they live so well? | ||
| I mean, the Bidens, Hunter grew up at a huge house. | ||
| In Wilmington, the family had this very expensive beach house. | ||
| And like, how do you do that on a politician's salary? | ||
| We don't pay our politicians very much. | ||
| Well, I think Hunter had a successful lobbying and advisory business. | ||
| Sure, but these are his dad's houses. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, how does that, how does that, did you ever wonder, like, how do you do that? | ||
| Well, you know, that question, I really only was under the kind of tenure at the Naval Observatory, so I knew the government was paying, we were paying for it. | ||
| No, of course, but like they had these other houses. | ||
| Yeah, I never, I was at Bo's house, I was at Hunter's house, but those were the houses, so that was not something that I often thought about, put it that way. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's just interesting because you're coming from a non-political world on Long Island, middle class world, and you wind up in all these high flyers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And some of them don't have business jobs. | ||
| They have political jobs, but they're living really, really well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought the cost of living was lower. | ||
| It is pretty remarkable. | ||
| It's a beautiful, suburban place to live. | ||
| And yeah, I mean, I think that, again, the money that's thrown around D.C. is significant. | ||
| I mean, as far as lobbying contracts and legal contracts and all of the, you know, the bills that go out. | ||
| I mean, there's money flow. | ||
| I mean, it certainly is. | ||
| But it sticks to the people who live there. | ||
| Like, the money is supposed to go out to the whole continent. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, that's a bigger discussion. | ||
| Doesn't it? | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So when Biden called for Shokin to be fired very publicly and then got it done, like, bam. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What did you think? | ||
| Again, they've tried to beat this into my head a million times because it does work on paper as far as the logical steps. | ||
| But we were told that Shoken had already been taken care of, that he was under control, and that this is going to be a whole big problem for Burisma now. | ||
| Yeah, it's a huge problem. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| The guy who was going to shut our business down just got fired. | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| It was kind of pounded into our heads. | ||
| Obviously, as I look back in the review, it doesn't paper as well. | ||
| But it looks like there was something. | ||
| I'm asking you because you said at the outset that, well, first of all, that you liked Hunter. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Who was a very likable, I can attest personally, a very likable guy. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But that you thought it was, you know, useful. | ||
| He knows his way around Washington. | ||
| His dad's vice president of the United States. | ||
| All this stuff. | ||
| It's all good. | ||
| But that there was the Icarus problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That, like, if you use those contexts too much, maybe it hurts you. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Maybe you get burned by it. | ||
| Did you feel that when Shokin got fired? | ||
| Like, ooh, maybe this is a little bit... | ||
| No. | ||
| A little close to the sun here. | ||
| No, on that one, I just was kind of... | ||
| Listen, I was... | ||
| I was... | ||
| I was... | ||
| Believing the narrative, because we were in, where I felt the Icarus was when he got, right when he announced we were in Doha. | ||
| As one is. | ||
| As one is, running around with some of the royal family at another conference. | ||
| And, you know, part of the benefits of actually doing the Rosemount Seneca partnership, you know, you're getting access in these meetings. | ||
| Anyway, long story short, we're in Doha, and they release some picture on the website that Hunter had joined the board. | ||
| And that was like the tipping point where Icarus had arrived a little too close to the sun. | ||
| And the rest of my story has been a slow downward trajectory change at that point. | ||
| Like this, exactly. | ||
| That was the Icarus moment. | ||
| When I saw that release and I saw... | ||
| Was it Burisma that had released that? | ||
| Burisma released it, didn't tell us. | ||
| And it was like the most Googled news story in the world for 18 hours. | ||
| And I was like, this is going to be a different world. | ||
| Well, because to a civilian, you're thinking, okay, huge, super lucrative Eastern European natural gas company. | ||
| Sort of semi-employed kind of lawyer lobbyist from D.C. Like, what is he doing on their board? | ||
| Like, it just seemed... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then, really, at the time, I was... | ||
| I didn't have, you know... | ||
| We didn't calculate the risk appropriately. | ||
| And the rest is history. | ||
| So whether or not Hunter convinced his dad to come out against Shokan in their debate, it was very clear that the Burisma guys were hoping to leverage Hunter's relationship with the vice president and his father. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| At one point, they told Hunter to, quote, call his dad? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think referencing the email that you... | ||
| Put earlier, there was constant pressure to send signals, to leverage all of his, you know, his dad included, but the Biden brand, all of the, you know, the DC insider and relationships to help Burisma survive. | ||
| I think that's the, you know, at the end of the day, what we're talking about. | ||
| That was the idea. | ||
| That's what he brought. | ||
| It was that ability to help on the geopolitical stage, keep them out of trouble, keep them out of investigations, unfreeze assets, unsuccessfully unfreeze visas. | ||
| And the first challenge, which was like there was a 23 million pound account that was released to Burisma because of alleged Non-cooperation by the prosecutor. | ||
| I don't know if Shokin or the guy before that. | ||
| But that was successful. | ||
| And I think... | ||
| Did Hunter help with that? | ||
| The perception of him being on the board probably provided a halo that helped with that, but no active. | ||
| There was no active... | ||
| But they were not consulting him on pipeline construction or wellhead design? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It was hiring lobbyists and law firms to... | ||
| And various NGOs to help clear the path from regulatory roadblocks at the end of the day. | ||
| When they asked him to call his dad, did he? | ||
| I was not privy to the conversation directly, but they've asked... | ||
| Vadim met with his dad at dinner at Cafe Milano, a famous dinner at Cafe Milano. | ||
| You know, I did not listen to a particular call where they spoke, but I know that the request was made by Vadim a lot. | ||
| What did Vadim say to the vice president at that dinner at Cafe Milano? | ||
| At dinner it was, you know, politics. | ||
| I think there was a World Food Program element, weather, nothing specific to Burisma. | ||
| But... | ||
| The idea was by having that relationship and by saying, I met with the vice president in Washington, that gives him a swat. | ||
| Yeah, I think at the end of it, that's the prize or the being able to have, whether it's on speakerphone or in person, to have that person in direct contact, whether you're talking about weather or politics or... | ||
| What have you, that that's the important part. | ||
| I don't think, you know, there's no relevance in asking, you know, the vice president about, you know, the gas, you know, revenues or anything like that. | ||
| It's enough. | ||
| It's enough. | ||
| And the prize is that contact and that access to power. | ||
| What was the payment like from Burisma? | ||
| Like, what did he get? | ||
| I mean, he famously made $83,000 a month. | ||
| It was $83,000 a month. | ||
| Yeah, it was taken into a company. | ||
| It was two. | ||
| The contracts were around board seats, and then the scope of work was him on the governance side, as we've talked about. | ||
| And I was first to raise capital, but then after the Doha Google situation where they announced him on the board, raising outside capital was out. | ||
| So it became an international expansion. | ||
| So the payment was $2 million a year to one of our LLCs. | ||
| There were other business activities that happened in that. | ||
| We had to pay some of the cap intro guys that introduced us initially through the Rosamount Realty. | ||
| So he, you know, the payments were, and I think it's incredibly well documented. | ||
| Initially, it was about $600,000, $700,000 a year. | ||
| It built to about a million, and then it was, I think, less for the rest of his tenure. | ||
| The second his father left. | ||
| The VP's office, it went down. | ||
| I think that happened. | ||
| You think that happened? | ||
| I was long out of it by then, but I think I've been told. | ||
| What about gifts? | ||
| And this is a part of the world where people give gifts, and those gifts are kind of non-taxable payment, you could argue. | ||
| You could argue. | ||
| You could argue. | ||
| Were there gifts? | ||
| Yeah, there were some birthday gifts. | ||
| A watch. | ||
| Watch. | ||
| A watch. | ||
| Just Timex kind of watch? | ||
| No. | ||
| What was the watch? | ||
| I believe it was a Hubolt. | ||
| A Hubolt. | ||
| I'm not actually sure. | ||
| I shouldn't even say that. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| But I know there's a birthday gift. | ||
| I've also been refreshed in my memory through a series of documents that have been put on fire. | ||
| Yeah, through your testimony to the Congress. | ||
| It might have. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So a watch like that would cost, like, ballpark? | ||
| You know, $50,000 to $100,000. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So a real gift. | ||
| A real gift. | ||
| Meaningful. | ||
| So you're working in Ukraine, and just based on our off-camera conversations, we're actually interested in the business. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And it's kind of an interesting business, actually. | ||
| It powers the world. | ||
| Right, it powers the world. | ||
| Meaningful business. | ||
| In your time in Ukraine, did you notice a lot of Americans running around from Washington exerting influence over there? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I think, obviously, it's an important part of the world, I think, for different factions of, you know... | ||
| Different opposing East-West types of views. | ||
| So yes, there were a lot of Americans lobbying, USAID, you know, State Department officials. | ||
| There were a lot of Americans kind of working. | ||
| Because the picture you paint doesn't sound like a sovereign country. | ||
| It really does seem like a protectorate or something. | ||
| Yeah, a protectorate might be an overstep. | ||
| But yes, there is a lot of interest in Ukraine and who controls Ukraine. | ||
| And that's a geopolitical conversation. | ||
| Did you ever see Toria Newland there? | ||
| I never saw her in person, but I think that was in her scope, in her theater. | ||
| Did she have a lot of influence in Ukraine? | ||
| She did, yeah. | ||
| She did. | ||
| It was constantly trying to curry favor with her. | ||
| She was one that you wanted on your good side, as I remember. | ||
| I don't remember the specifics. | ||
| One of the ambassadors mentioned Burisma as corrupt at some point, and that was a big thing, and there was a big effort to try and redact that. | ||
| I think there was some lobbying done to her or with her. | ||
| Did it get done? | ||
| No, obviously Burisma. | ||
| I think Nikolai, who came to New York and ate a cat's deli back in 2012, looking at the real estate pitch, ended up in Cyprus. | ||
| I think he's still there. | ||
| So no, nothing ever worked with that, though. | ||
| I do believe that, you know, at the end of the day, Burisma wouldn't have stayed in business so long, you know, if Hunter was not on the board. | ||
| So they got their money back. | ||
| I think they got some years. | ||
| Why did you leave? | ||
| I left in something completely unrelated. | ||
| Okay, so you got in trouble with another company. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so you got off the board, but Hunter stayed on. | ||
| Hunter stayed on, yeah. | ||
| How long did you remain in business with him? | ||
| After we had the issue with that other company, I was no longer in business. | ||
| With him? | ||
| With him. | ||
| I was friendly. | ||
| We retained a friendship for a couple of years. | ||
| And then there was... | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| I can't talk about it because it's not a good case. | ||
| But there was a... | ||
| A reversal of a conviction, and then there was a, you know, subsequently that, the reversal of a conviction was re-reversed. | ||
| And after the re-reversal, we kind of never spoke again. | ||
| For legal reasons, or was there enmity between you? | ||
| It was just, no, no, absolutely no. | ||
| There's, you know, again, looking back at the body of work, it was... | ||
| You know, a very big strategic mistake for me to, you know, be involved with him. | ||
| And some of it was my fault because, quite frankly, I was pitching Burisma Rosemont Realty. | ||
| And that ended up, you know, the genesis of that was me. | ||
| But obviously, the trajectory of my life would have been far different and arguably far better if I've never met him. | ||
| And you didn't make that much money from Burisma. | ||
| No. | ||
| I think it was, I mean, relative to the world, yes, it was a lot of money. | ||
| Relative to my middle class upbringing, it was a ton of money. | ||
| But it wasn't life-changing money, and it was quickly exhausted on legal bills. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what's interesting in this conversation is you're very sympathetic to Hunter Biden, the person. | ||
| Like, you like him. | ||
| You still say you like him. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| His children. | ||
| I mean, I've been to the lacrosse games. | ||
| It's a good family, and they've got a great relationship. | ||
| Father and son speak every day. | ||
| I've witnessed that for 10 years. | ||
| So, and you're not, I mean, you work for John Kerry for president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You're obviously not a partisan. | ||
| I was a volunteer. | ||
| Yeah, but you're not a partisan actor. | ||
| I think it's fair to say you're not grinding political acts. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| Here. | ||
| How have you been treated by, well, you obviously are a Democrat or were a Democrat most of your life anyway. | ||
| Well, I was never registered Democrat. | ||
| I was registered independent, but just for the record. | ||
| But I have been treated by, you know. | ||
| The treatment seems to be the treatment of just getting out ahead of this and speaking the truth and just retelling my story that a lot of people seem to be interested. | ||
| A lot of the negativity seems to come anonymously. | ||
| Obviously there's murmurs of... | ||
| You know, different folks saying different things. | ||
| But, you know, the threats and stuff like that seem to come from whether they're AI bots or, you know, people in a basement in Cleveland. | ||
| Not to pick on Cleveland, but it might be. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, I can't kind of pinpoint it, but it is definitely a bit of a scary time. | ||
| The reaction to what you've said in public, to what you said to the committee on the Hill. | ||
| And doubtless to what you've been telling us in this interview, is that there's no corruption here at all. | ||
| This is totally normal. | ||
| Joe Biden had no role whatsoever in his son's business or knowledge of it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, that seems false. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's categorically false. | ||
| I think that he was aware of Hunter's business. | ||
| He met with Hunter's business partners. | ||
| I mean, you found a letter that... | ||
| That illustrates that he knew me. | ||
| And he's thanking you. | ||
| He's thanking you for his efforts. | ||
| For your efforts. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's not factually right. | ||
| But in the same breath, I don't think Joe Biden's looked at a balance sheet or a cap table or what have you, or any financial document, probably ever. | ||
| Done pretty well for not looking at... | ||
| Well, that's... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So who is Jimmy Biden, his brother? | ||
| Jimmy Biden, his brother, is... | ||
| That's Joe, the president's brother. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he really picked up, you know, post my, you know, issues and worked with him, you know, in businesses that he got into in China and Romania, kind of after my tenure with the Rosemont Seneca Partners. | ||
| But he was... | ||
| I think he probably filled some void of, you know, companionship and, you know, business companionship, you know, in the years after I was, you know, basically sideline. | ||
| Did you ever spend time with him? | ||
| Not a lot. | ||
| You know, three or four times. | ||
| Three or four times. | ||
| So he ran... | ||
| There's not a lot written about him. | ||
| He ran a nightclub for a while in Wilmington, I think, that went under. | ||
| But was it your sense that he had... | ||
| A high degree of business acumen? | ||
| He was always willing. | ||
| I have no real opinion about Jimmy, quite frankly. | ||
| I know he likes Diet Mountain Dew. | ||
| Diet Mountain Dew? | ||
| Yeah, I'm a big Diet Mountain Dew guy. | ||
| But yeah, I never did a business deal with him. | ||
| I socially interacted with him on very few occasions. | ||
| But did you think it's a little weird? | ||
| So here's Hunter Biden. | ||
| And here's the brother Jimmy with the Diet Mountain Dew. | ||
| Like, what is this exactly? | ||
| This Biden brand. | ||
| What is the business? | ||
| What is the, as a whole? | ||
| Yeah, what is the business? | ||
| It's a diverse portfolio of opportunity. | ||
| It's a diverse portfolio of opportunity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Hunter and Jimmy. | ||
| Well, obviously, I mean, you've seen the, you know, again, I keep referring to the rearview mirror. | ||
| I mean, the portfolio has, you know, exhausted and Hunter's on to better things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he's an artist. | ||
| He is an artist, yes. | ||
| And I'm not going to offer any reviews of his work, but I just have to ask, in the many years that you spent, in the 10 years you spent with him, did he evidence any interest in painting? | ||
| No, not particularly. | ||
| But he was a very well-read student of history, so he was far more interested in, I wouldn't say artistic ventures, but certainly not painting. | ||
| That was a surprise. | ||
| It was a surprise. | ||
| Yeah, it was a surprise. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| I mean, I think that after looking at the portfolio of our experiences, I might do the same thing. | ||
| You might do the same thing. | ||
| Because, I mean, that's a long haul. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Covered with tragedy and addiction. | ||
| And then going through all that, I think you just have to have a reset. | ||
| That makes sense to me. | ||
| Getting $500,000. | ||
| For your paintings, like six months after you start painting, seems a little weird. | ||
| No? | ||
| I mean, I'm not an artist. | ||
| I mean, I do have some artists in my family. | ||
| I wish my grandfather got that. | ||
| But yeah, no, that's good for him. | ||
| Do you think if, I mean, your life has also taken, you know, ups and downs and twists and turns you didn't expect? | ||
| If you decided, like, in six months to start painting, do you think that you could get $500,000 a painting? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It depends on how this show goes. | ||
| Do you think that's one of the opportunities open to you in your diverse portfolio? | ||
| That's really why I'm here. | ||
| To pitch your painting. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I'm starting. | ||
| A lot since the laptop came out. | ||
| What did you think of that, by the way? | ||
| The laptop? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Were you shocked by that? | ||
| That was not great. | ||
| Yeah, that was obviously I'm... | ||
| Not great? | ||
| That's in the not great category? | ||
| Not great. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Yeah, that was a real bummer, I guess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In the not great category. | ||
| What did I think about it? | ||
| I mean, it was an absolute shock that's perpetuated this, you know, kind of nightmare that I've been living for the last eight years. | ||
| Did he call you when that came out? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, he did not. | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| No. | ||
| Because you're obviously on it. | ||
| No, extensively. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Not visually, but... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not a single naked picture of you on that laptop. | ||
| There is not. | ||
| Yeah, all over it. | ||
| And it's just led to just incessant and never-ending media fodder that brings me back in. | ||
| Last question. | ||
| A lot has been written about his drug and alcohol problems. | ||
| And the laptop is... | ||
| Is a visual record of those. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How did they affect your relationship with him? | ||
| Well, you know, he was, for the initial part of our, you know, the tenure of our relationship and business partnership, it was, he was sober. | ||
| So there was no, there wasn't a part of our, you know, it wasn't part of our relationship. | ||
| And then I think... | ||
| There's some, you know, some tragedy that fell upon him with his brother and, you know, coming from an early past of tragedy, you know, things got hard mentally and he slipped back in and obviously that created, you know, some chaos, but that was, you know, created less effective kind of business decisions. | ||
| Now, Burisma was already started, so that... | ||
| That moment, that tipping point had already happened at the end of the day, where the downhill spiral started, and I think a lot of those pressures of the media also contributed to it. | ||
| But you're tethered to this guy in business, right? | ||
| And then he starts to fall apart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And it was not, yes, it was not a, you know, he made a lot of efforts to, you know, to repair and go to rehab and get better. | ||
| And then I, you know, again, through another business that we're involved in, was kind of taken out. | ||
| So I didn't really, I didn't go through the actual kind of full downward spiral and then rebirth. | ||
| You said you were taken out. | ||
| Do you think you were taken out? | ||
| No. | ||
| I just, I can't comment on that. | ||
| It's an ongoing case. | ||
| Probably not out of the realm of possibility, one suspects. | ||
| Devin Archer, thank you for spending all this time. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Y'all hear people say the news is full of wine. | |
| And Kennedy's motorcade. | ||
| 239 people. |
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