A4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022
some of the laptop emails about
12 hours after the Russian
Defense Ministry made its
presentation. There is no
mention of the Russian claim.
Raheem Kassam, the editor in
chief, insisted to The Fact
Checker that he was unaware of
the Russian allegations until five
minutes before publication,
when he did a quick Google
check.
Carlson then cited the
National Pulse reporting that
night on his show. He also made
no mention of the Russian
Defense Ministry allegations,
though in another part of his
monologue he said he had
spoken to “someone with direct
firsthand knowledge of this
topic,” who claimed that the
United States had moved
“bioweapons research offshore”
to Ukraine because it was too
dangerous to conduct in the
United States. Maybe it’s just a
coincidence, but that’s also what
Kirillov, the Russian official, had
claimed that morning. Carlson
did not respond to a request for
comment.
The Daily Mail on Friday
followed up with a more
detailed look at the Biden emails
mentioning Metabiota. This
article acknowledged the
Russian presentation but
declared “emails and
correspondence obtained by
DailyMail.com from Hunter’s
abandoned laptop show the
claims may well be true.” That
same approach was taken by the
New York Post in an article
published on Saturday. The New
York Post did not respond to a
request for comment, while a
Daily Mail spokesman said: “We
stand by our reporting.”
One of the laptop emails
shows Hunter Biden contacting
an official at Burisma, a
Ukrainian gas company where
he was a board director, in April
2014 about the possibility of a
“science project” involving
Metabiota. The reply email from
the Burisma official indicates
some skepticism and confusion
about what Biden was pitching.
In the early months of 2014,
political tensions in Ukraine had
risen sharply. The Ukrainian
president had resigned in
February and fled to Russia.
Within weeks, Russia invaded
and subsequently annexed
Crimea.
In response, the Defense
Department issued a “stop-
work” order on Black & Veatch’s
contract, and Metabiota was
scrambling to find work for its
local scientists and researchers,
the person familiar with the
contract said. Hunter Biden
briefly tried to use his
connections to help the firm, but
nothing came of his outreach.
The work ended in June 2014
and was not revived until the
political situation calmed down
a year later — after RSTP had
cut ties with Biden.“Our current value of the
[Pilot Growth Equity]
investment is $1.1 million,” the
investor said. “So this was a big
money loser.”
In a statement to The Fact
Checker, Metabiota said:
“Metabiota worked in Ukraine
until 2020, providing training to
help improve local capacity to
detect and respond to health
threats. We’re concerned about
the disinformation and the
impact it may have on the safety
of scientists working to support
public health in Ukraine and
worldwide.”Russian disinformation
spreads
In other words, Hunter Biden
was barely involved in the RSTP
deal. Moreover, the investment
had nothing to do with the
Ukraine labs. But Hunter
Biden’s laptop contains some
emails that discuss the pending
investment.
Those emails led to reporting
in the right-wing media that did
not initially mention the source
of the original allegation — the
Russian Defense Ministry. And
the journey of this false
storyline from Moscow to U.S.
media is yet another reminder of
how disinformation spreads in
this polarized modern era.
The National Pulse, a website
run by former associates of
former Trump adviser Stephen
K. Bannon, on Thursday
published an account based onand could be used to create an
insurance product that would
shield companies — or even
entire countries — from a global
economic downturn during a
pandemic.
Not much money could be
earned with Metabiota’s
contracts to place researchers in
labs. But the insights that could
be gained from being on the
ground were considered
valuable. “The DOD contract
was a loss leader intended to
build a knowledge base,” the
investor said, using a business
term for selling a product or
service at a price that is not
profitable in hopes of generating
additional business.
Most of the company’s work
was in African countries,
according to the confidential
deal memo. Regarding Ukraine,
the 44-page memo mentions
only that the company had an
office in the country, which will
“implement a research project in
Ukraine aimed at understanding
the threat of tularemia and
anthrax” and “develop and
implement a public awareness
campaign to mitigate the threat
of African swine fever.” A person
familiar with the Ukraine
contract at the time said it
employed about five local
nationals and one expatriate.Hunter Biden’s ouster
Moreover, by the time the
document was written, on Nov.
18, 2014, Hunter Biden was
already in hot water with his
colleagues. A month earlier, the
Wall Street Journal reported
that he had been discharged
that February from the Navy
Reserve after testing positive for
cocaine use. Biden had not
disclosed the discharge to RSTP
members and so, in early 2015,
he was eased out of the firm, the
investor said. RSTP in 2016
rebranded itself Pilot Growth
Equity.
“We were marketing our
funds to investors, positioning
our management as having a
certain level of character,” the
investor said. “We would not be
able to raise money from
investors” if Biden had
remained a member of RSTP. So
Biden was removed from the
RSTP Management Company
and RSTP Fund I, which
included the Metabiota
investment. After that point, he
had no economic interest or
ownership interest in either
entity.
Chris Clark, an attorney for
Hunter Biden, did not respond
to repeated queries. Archived
RSTP webpages show that Biden
was removed from the “team”
page between 2014 and 2015,
even as his business partner
Devon Archer remained.
Pilot Growth Equity invested
a total of $11.39 million in the
fund and still owns 10.8 percent
of Metabiota, according to a
Dec. 31, 2020, investment sheet
viewed by The Fact Checker. The
2014 investment memo
optimistically anticipated an
initial public offering by 2017,
but that did not happen. Even
with the coronavirus pandemic,
hopes for a booming insurance
market to protect companies
from such events have not
panned out. Wolfe, in a 2020
interview with Wired magazine,
said not a single company ever
bought an insurance contract.public health infrastructure
needs. The work has always
centered on improving the
health, safety and well-being of
the Ukrainian people.”
Dangerous pathogens are
kept in freezers in these labs, so
U.S. officials have expressed
concern that a loss of electrical
power because of the war could
allow for their escape —
concerns that Russia has used to
underscore its claims that these
are military bioweapons labs
working for the United States.
Federal contracting records
show Metabiota also received
$18.4 million from DTRA
between 2014 and 2017 under a
competitively bid contract. Just
$307,091 is listed as earmarked
for “Ukraine research projects.”
The company had a significantly
bigger contract at the time with
DTRA in Tanzania, where its
focus was on controlling the
spread of Rift Valley fever.An investment firm tied to
Hunter Biden
So where’s Hunter Biden in all of
this? Let’s start with an
investment vehicle called
Rosemont Seneca Partners. It
was founded by Hunter Biden,
Devon Archer and Christopher
Heinz in 2009. That firm, in
turn, had a stake in an
independent company called
Rosemont Seneca Technology
Partners (RSTP), which invested
in emerging technology
companies.
Through his stake in
Rosemont Seneca, Biden was a
member of RSTP and would
have benefited from successful
investments. But he was not on
the committee making decisions
on investments, according to an
investor at the time, who spoke
on the condition of anonymity
because he was disclosing
confidential business
information.
When Metabiota had the
DTRA contract, the company
was transitioning from a
nonprofit to a profit-making
enterprise and sought funding
from Wall Street and Silicon
Valley investors. In early 2014,
RSTP invested $500,000 in what
is known as the seed round — a
new company’s initial effort to
raise capital, according to the
investor. Later that year, RSTP
contributed $10 million,
according to a 2014 confidential
memo on Metabiota’s
investments obtained by The
Fact Checker. That gave RSTP
13.4 percent ownership of the
company. The memo said
Metabiota was not expected to
achieve consistent profitability
until 2017.
These investments were not
related to the U.S.-funded labs in
Ukraine. Instead, investors such
as RSTP were betting on a new
idea — selling insurance to
protect businesses against a
global pandemic.
Any company seeking to raise
money in the private-equity
market needs “a story” to lure
investors, who hope to score big
if the company eventually sells
shares to the public. The Ebola
virus outbreak in 2014 had
raised corporate fears of a global
pandemic. Metabiota’s “story”
was that the data collected by
the firm’s epidemiologists and
researchers around the world
provided an early-warning
system on emerging biothreatsBiden, the chart shows a box
with Soros. A line then connects
Soros to Gilead Sciences, a U.S.
biopharmaceutical company
that was a Pentagon
subcontractor. The line
eventually leads to the
Ukrainian Health Ministry and
the labs.
Soros Fund Management, an
investment firm founded by
Soros in 1970, as recently as
2010 owned shares of Gilead,
according to Securities and
Exchange Commission filings,
along with hundreds of other
stocks. But that’s it. “We have no
affiliation with George Soros —
any assertion otherwise is
completely false,” said Chris
Ridley, a Gilead spokesman. His
statement is confirmed by the
most recent SEC filing by Soros
Fund Management, as well as by
Laura Silber, a Soros
spokeswoman.
Now, let’s examine the alleged
Hunter Biden connection. The
flow chart shows a line from
Hunter Biden to “Rosemont
Seneca,” which in turn is
connected to Metabiota, which
advises governments and
companies on health epidemics.
There’s also a line connecting
Metabiota to the Defense Threat
Reduction Agency (DTRA), an
arm of the Pentagon, which
initially funded the Ukrainian
labs. The line from Metabiota
then traces to the labs.
The DTRA line to Metabiota is
a tacit admission by the
Russians that Pentagon funding
played a role in the company’s
work. The United States and
Ukraine in 2005 had signed an
agreement under which the
Defense Department, at no cost
to Ukraine, would assist the
Ministry of Health in building
and maintaining the labs. The
United States “has invested
approximately $200 million in
Ukraine since 2005, supporting
46 Ukrainian laboratories,
health facilities, and diagnostic
sites,” the Defense Department
said in a fact sheet released this
month.A San Francisco technology
company
Metabiota, which is based in San
Francisco, was founded by
Nathan Wolfe, a prominent
virologist. The firm essentially
acted as a staffing agency,
helping identify people who
could be hired to work in high-
level biological research labs
and providing research
mentoring, according to a
company official. Another U.S.
firm, Black & Veatch, was hired
by the Defense Department
under a contract aimed at
enhancing disease diagnosis.
That company was mainly to
build labs, and Metabiota was
one of its subcontractors.
“There are only diagnostic
laboratories for routine human
and animal health requirements
akin to any standard U.S.-based
public-facing diagnostic
laboratory,” said Andrea Chaney,
a DTRA spokeswoman, in a
statement. “For many years, the
companies Black & Veatch,
Metabiota, and Gilead Sciences
have performed a variety of
training, renovation, and
equipping projects
competitively awarded by the
Cooperative Threat Reduction
program to support Ukrainian
critical human and veterinarian“Hunter Biden’s
Rosemont Seneca
investment fund
financed the
Pentagon’s
military
biological
program in
Ukraine, said
Igor Kirillov,
head of the
radiation,
chemical and biological defense
forces of the Russian Armed
Forces.”
— RIA Novosti, Russian
state-owned domestic news
agency, March 24
“The National Pulse is
reporting tonight apparently a
private equity firm run by
Hunter Biden funded some of the
research into pathogens in these
bio labs.”
— Tucker Carlson, remarks
on his Fox News show, March
24
“Russia’s assertion that
President Biden’s son Hunter
was ‘financing... biological
laboratories in Ukraine’ was
based in truth, according to e-
mails reviewed by The Post.”
— New York Post article,
March 26
“BOMBSHELL: Did Russia
Invade Ukraine Because of the
Bidens’ Biolabs? Hunter’s
Laptop Says ‘Yes’ ”
— Headline on PJ Media
article, March 26
The Russian Defense Ministry
knows how to stir up the
interest of the right-leaning
news media in the United
States: Just mention Hunter
Biden, the president’s son.
Russia for years has been
seeding the ground to claim that
the United States set up
biowarfare labs in Ukraine and
other former Soviet republics —
claims that have been revived as
part of the invasion of Ukraine.
As part of his media
presentation, Igor Kirillov of the
Russian armed forces alleged
the labs were part of the U.S.
plot to study the natural
immunity of the population to
identify the most dangerous
pathogen for people in the
region.
The Defense Ministry
released a complex-looking flow
chart with spaghetti lines
depicting not only the
involvement of Hunter Biden
but financier George Soros in
the alleged financing of
“bioweapons labs.” But the
reference to Hunter Biden was
catnip to the right-leaning
media. Reporters immediately
dug into their copies of Biden’s
laptop, supposedly left behind
for repair in a Delaware shop in
April 2019, and dredged up
emails that they suggested
validated the Russian report.
First of all, as we have
previously documented, these
are not bioweapons labs but
biological research facilities
focused on better detecting,
diagnosing and monitoring
infectious-disease outbreaks.
Second, random emails can be
easily misinterpreted without
additional reporting.
We’ve dug into the records
and discussed the deals in
question with people involved.
The reporting from those news
outlets is false. Hunter Biden
has come under scrutiny for
business deals in places such as
Ukraine and China that took
place while his father was vice
president. But he was not
“financing” these labs. In fact,
he was not part of a decision to
invest in a company at the
center of the Russian
allegations, did not profit from
it as he was kicked out of the
investment firm over cocaine
allegations, and the company
made little money from its tiny
bit of business in Ukraine.
The Pentagon program
There are several layers to this
story, so let’s peel the onion.
There is a U.S.-led project,
known as the Cooperative
Threat Reduction program, to
help former Soviet republics
transform old labs that had once
been integrated into the Soviet
biological weapons program
into state-of-the-art civilian
biological research facilities.
Various American companies
received contracts from the
Pentagon to do that work. One
of those subcontractors — a
relatively minor one called
Metabiota — did some work in
Ukraine. That firm received an
investment from a private-
equity firm associated with
Hunter Biden.
That investment had nothing
to do with the labs in Ukraine.
But the Russian Defense
Ministry’s flow chart is a good
illustration of how tenuous
connections can be made to look
sinister. Underneath Hunter
The truth on Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian ‘bio labs’ he supposedly funded
The Fact
Checker
GLENN
KESSLER
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
Hunter Biden departs the U.S. Capitol after his father’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. Russian Defense Ministry allegations about Biden’s
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