Hunter Biden Challenges Claims From Private Investigative Firm in Paternity Case

Hunter Biden, son of former Vice President Joe Biden, waits for the start of his father's debate at Centre College in Danville, Ky., on Oct. 11, 2012. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo)

Hunter Biden’s attorneys challenged a fresh claim from a private investigative firm made in a paternity case in Arkansas, attempting to strike down the most recent filings made by D&A Investigations.

Lawyers for Biden, the son of Democratic presidential contender and ex-Vice President Joe Biden, was successful in getting the first claims made by the firm struck down by Judge Don McSpadden, who ruled the firm didn’t intervene pursuant to Arkansas civil law.

But the firm filed a new motion (pdf) to intervene on Dec. 27, claiming it gave lawyers for Lunden Roberts, who is suing Biden for child support, access to the defendant’s bank account records subject of known felonies including fraud and counterfeiting.

The firm said it couldn’t include the records because of federal and state statutes but that the records showed Biden was the subject of “criminal investigation(s) both adjudicated and ongoing, of which he is a party to.”

The records provide the source and destination bank account numbers of Burisma, the Ukranian energy company Biden worked for from 2014 to 2019, the Bank of China, and Rosemont Seneca, the investment firm Biden worked for, among other entities, D&A claimed.

Bank records also “verify the Counterfeiting scheme” that ended up accumulating over $156 million,” it said.

In a motion to strike filed on Dec. 30, Biden’s attorneys said the motion to intervene is a “scheme by a non-party simply to make scandalous allegations in the pending suit to gain media attention without any material or pertinent material.”

Then-Vice President Joe Biden waves as he walks out of Air Force Two with his granddaughter Finnegan Biden (C) and son Hunter Biden (R) at the airport in Beijing on Dec. 4, 2013. (Ng Han Guan-Pool/Getty Images)

The judge should strike the pleading because D&A was again improperly trying to intervene, Biden’s team said (pdf).

“The proposed intervenor in this case has failed to even state a claim or defense for which it seeks intervention. The proposed intervenor has no interest in this cause that needs protecting to support intervention of right. The proposed intervenor’s claims are immaterial, impertinent, and scandalous allegations which do not even attempt to assert common questions of law or fact to the pending paternity suit to permit intervention,” the filing stated.

“These unsubstantiated allegations,” they added, “are simply another stab at the Defendant in the myriad of media attention seekers.”

McSpadden hasn’t ruled yet on the motion to strike.

Another motion to intervene (pdf) came on Monday from Joel Caplan, who said he was acting on behalf of himself and hundreds of thousands of other American investors “who were defrauded in a systemic, formulaic, and biblically-sized multi-billion-dollar stock scheme known as ‘The China Hustle.’”

Caplan said he wants information about Biden’s deals in China. His filing said that his claim is linked with the paternity case, namely whether the disappearance of Chinese companies and the money they raised “is related, correlated, or has any nexus with the $1.5 billion dollars that Mr. Robert Hunter Biden received or allegedly received from high-level Chinese government officials and/or wealthy Chinese National investors.”

Roberts attorneys previously asked Biden to confirm how much he made while working for Burisma and for an entity linked to China.

The next hearing in the case is slated for Jan. 7, 2020.