A former business partner of Hunter Biden currently serving a prison sentence for fraud has reportedly released 26,000 emails detailing his business operations with Biden and Devon Archer, another business partner.
Breitbart News published a report over the weekend claiming that Bevan Cooney gave the conservative news outlet access to his Gmail account because he believes he is the "fall guy" for Biden's dealings and alleged corruption.
"He gave us written approval to do that, and gave us the password. We have been going through the 26,000 emails," Breitbart editor-at-large Peter Schweizer said. "Part of it is just kind of a feel for what is the Biden business model, and we kind of knew this in a way but here it’s very explicit that it is trading off the Biden name, the Biden connections, and the Biden access."
Schweizer added that these emails are not related to the trove of emails and photos recently reported on by the New York Post about Biden's foreign business dealings that critics say raise concerns about possible corruption and national security issues for him and his father, Joe Biden, the former vice president and current Democratic presidential nominee. Joe Biden has decried these reports as being part of a "smear campaign," but neither his son nor his campaign have denied the authenticity of the data.
"Yes, these are totally separate from the New York Post emails," Schweizer said. "I don’t have access, and have not had access to those emails."
Cooney is serving a 30-month sentence "for defrauding a Native American tribal entity and various investment advisory clients of tens of millions of dollars in connection with the issuance of bonds by the tribal entity and the subsequent sale of those bonds through fraudulent and deceptive means," according to the Department of Justice.
Cooney was convicted alongside Devon Archer and John Galanis in the scheme. In 2018, Archer's conviction was overturned, but a federal appeals court reinstated the conviction last week, according to Politico.
Though Archer's attorney said that Biden was "part of the deal" — he was listed as the vice chairman of the financial firm through which the fraudulent transactions were negotiated — George Mesires, Hunter Biden's attorney, told the Wall Street Journal that “the defendants ... invoked and used Hunter’s name — without his knowledge — to lend their business venture more credibility."
The attorney added that "as soon as Hunter learned of the illegal conduct, and that his name was being used in this unauthorized and inappropriate manner, Hunter took immediate steps to ensure that his business interests would not be associated with the Burnham Group or with any of the defendants."
Federal prosecutors never alleged that Biden was aware of the fraud scheme.
According to Breitbart, the emails outline how Biden used his father's name to attract business, including with Yelena Baturina, the ex-wife of the mayor of Moscow.
"What’s very curious about this is not only that they got these meetings on November 14, 2011, but they actually, according to members, had a private, secret meeting with Joe Biden himself," Schweizer said. "We don’t know about this because it appeared on the White House visitors logs or the White House calendar — it doesn’t. We know about it because the Chinese that were on that trip bragged about it in their blog posts back in China that they had this private, secret meeting with Joe Biden."
"Cooney is taking a risk because he’s trusting us with this trove of emails which includes personal information," Schweizer said. "So he’s taking quite a risk in sharing this information but he feels like it needs to get out because people need to understand how these deals were done."