Biden doesn’t sanction Russian billionaire linked to Hunter

WASHINGTON — President Biden kept his son Hunter’s alleged business associate Yelena Baturina off the list of new sanctions he announced Friday against prominent Russians to mark the first anniversary of the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Biden’s administration touted in a press release that it adopted “more than 2,500 sanctions” so far to cripple Russia’s economy and halt the war, but Baturina again skated by as about 200 more people and entities were sanctioned Friday.

White House spokespeople would not supply an on-record comment about Baturina’s remarkable good fortune.

Baturina, the billionaire widow of Moscow’s longtime former Mayor Yury Luzhkov, allegedly paid $3.5 million to a firm associated with first son Hunter Biden in February 2014 while his father was vice president. 

Records from a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden years later indicate that the then-second son met with his business partner Devon Archer and Baturina less than two months later at Lake Como in Italy. 

Baturina’s $3.5 million transfer was first revealed in a September 2020 report by Republican-led Senate committees, which cited suspicious activity reports filed by banks with the US government. 

Further reporting has linked Baturina’s funds to US real estate purchases, including in Brooklyn.

Like many other business dealings of Hunter Biden and first brother James Biden, the Biden family’s financial relationship with Baturina remains murky.

Biden allies point to an April 2022 fact check from the Washington Post that cites an anonymous source saying that Archer’s associates believed he had dissolved the corporate entity to which Baturina sent money, but that Archer, who has since been jailed for defrauding an American Indian tribe, secretly kept the entity in existence for his own use.

There’s been no documentation supporting that version of events and Hunter Biden’s laptop documents indicate the first son engaged with the Russian billionaire as she pumped funds from risky Russia into the relatively secure US.

“Hunter Biden had no interest in and was not a ‘co-founder’ of Rosemont Seneca Thornton, so the claim that he was paid $3.5 million is false,” his lawyer George Mesires said in 2020.

But emails show Hunter continued the association long after the transfer and even invited Baturina and her husband to an April 2015 dinner at a Georgetown restaurant, where then-Vice President Biden mingled with his son’s associates from Ukraine and Kazakhstan, according to photos and emails. Laptop documents do not make clear whether the Russian power couple attended.

Additional reporting has generated even more questions about the scale and breadth of Baturina’s financial links to the Bidens — with the revelation in October that she poured up to $100 million into her American investments. 

The White House has bristled at the suggestion that Biden has any conflicts of interest in foreign affairs due to his family’s consulting enterprises dating to his vice presidency.

Biden as a presidential candidate in 2020 said at a debate the $3.5 million claim was false and, growing flustered at the inquiry, called then-President Donald Trump a “clown.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki last year tried to talk past a question from The Post about the president’s apparent conflict of interest when it comes to sanctions decisions.

“He’s continued to sanction oligarchs more than we’ve ever sanctioned in the past, so I’m not sure that’s a conflict of interest,” Psaki insisted, without recognizing that the oligarch in question, Baturina, has not faced sanctions that were applied to many other Russian billionaires in response to Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine.

At a different press briefing shortly after Biden took office in 2021, Psaki went so far as to say she was “not familiar” with the widely circulated claim that a firm linked to her boss’ son may have received the $3.5 million.

In a counterpunch, some Democrats have circulated a report by Politico noting that former President Donald Trump sought to build a shopping mall and renovate a hotel in Moscow during Baturina’s husband’s corrupt 18-year reign from 1992-2010.

The Trump plans didn’t pan out and his then-communications director, Alyssa Farah, rejected the comparison, telling Politico, “while President Trump was leading a global real estate brand with properties all over the world, Hunter Biden was profiting off of his father’s government service by accepting $3.5 million from the Moscow Mayor’s wife. No comparison.”

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) is requesting from the Treasury Department records of all suspicious activity reports involving the Biden family’s international business deals.

Hunter Biden is under criminal investigation by the US attorney’s office in Delaware for possible tax fraud, money laundering, illegal foreign lobbying and lying about his drug use on a gun-purchase form.