Antony Blinken set up meetings with Hunter Biden using private email address
Rachel Schilke
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Email correspondence between then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Hunter Biden shows that meetings and lunches were set up by Blinken using his personal email address instead of his government address.
The batch of emails reviewed by the Washington Examiner dealt with conversations between Blinken and Biden when Blinken served as deputy secretary of state under former President Barack Obama. In 2015, Biden asked Blinken to get together to get his “advice on a couple of things,” to which Blinken set up a meeting using an AOL address instead of his state.gov address.
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On May 22, 2015, Biden emailed Blinken with a request to get together. At the time, Biden had been working for 13 months on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company that Biden was on the board of despite not having any experience in the industry. Biden’s appointment to the board has drawn intense scrutiny and criticism as Republicans have accused Biden of influence peddling and trading on his father’s name to enrich himself.
“Have a few minutes next week to grab a cup of coffee? I know you are impossibly busy, but would like to get your advice on a couple of things. Best, Hunter,” Biden wrote.
Blinken responded, “Absolutely. I’m just about to land in Tokyo en route back D.C. from Burma. I’ll be in office from Tuesday on. Copying Linda in my office to find a good time. Look forward to seeing you. Tony.”
The emails were then forwarded in two directions: Hunter Biden sent the exchange to Devon Archer, a fellow member of the Burisma board, while Blinken forwarded the emails to Linda Landers, his then-personal assistant.
Landers, using her state.gov address, later reached out to Biden, telling him to “advise on best times for you next week and we’ll try to accommodate.”
The lunch between Blinken and Hunter Biden eventually took place on July 22, 2015, according to the emails. The meeting times were shared with Archer and Eric Schwerin, another business partner.
It is unknown why Archer and Schwerin were copied on the email chains, and it is unclear what conversations Blinken and the younger Biden had during their lunch meetings.
Blinken’s use of a personal email address to set up the meetings could create a pathway for investigation. In July 2010, Hunter Biden emailed Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, to ask for her husband’s personal email.
“Can I get Toni’s non-govt email? I wanted to send him something. Thanks,” Hunter Biden wrote. In 2010, Blinken served as then-Vice President Joe Biden‘s national security adviser.
Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos, a cyber forensics expert and former Secret Service agent, conducted an examination of the laptop for the Washington Examiner last year, concluding that “there is a 100% certainty that Robert Hunter Biden was the only person responsible for the activity on this hard drive and all of its stored data” and that “the hard drive is authentic.”
Pete McGinnis, communications director for the Functional Government Initiative, told the Washington Examiner that ultimately, it appears as though high-ranking subordinates of Joe Biden were “enabling” Hunter Biden to travel around the world “trading his father’s name to enrich himself.”
“They may also have been doing so in a way that was outside the rules,” McGinnis said. “We now have evidence that around the same time Blinken’s then-boss, Hillary Clinton, was using a private server to conduct government business, he may have been engaged in practices that blurred the lines between his official duties and private interests.”
“Given these circumstances, as well as Blinken’s recently exposed involvement in the ‘Hunter laptop letter,’ the public is right to be concerned,” McGinnis added.
Functional Government Initiative typically looks into cases such as these with ethical implications, so it is a possibility that the organization could investigate the Blinken-Hunter Biden personal email scenario, McGinnis said.
Since taking the majority in 2022, House Republicans have launched investigations into the younger Biden’s financials and infamous laptop contents to prove whether his overseas work posed national security risks.
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The connections between high-level Biden administrators and Hunter Biden have turned the heads of several GOP lawmakers, including Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who chairs the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who heads the House Judiciary Committee.
The House Judiciary Committee revealed last week that CIA acting director Michael Morell testified in private that Blinken had “triggered” a letter from 50 ex-intelligence officials that sought to discredit reporting on the laptop’s emails and blame the story as a product of Russian disinformation.