The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-10)

A4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022

sold for about $11.7 million each, property records show, for a gain of more than $14 million. J.P. Folsgaard Bak, a Danish lawyer who moved to the United States to become an entrepreneur, headed the Buffalo company misidentified in the report. The company had closed its doors in 2018 after Trump’s Chinese tariffs made Chinese components more expensive and the tablets unprofitable. Bak said he was reading the Daily Mail in 2020, shortly after the Senate report was released, and was stunned to see an article saying his company had received payments from a Russian billionaire. The committee staff had not contacted the company before publication of the report. Bak said the story exploded on social media and threats were being made against him and his wife. He sought an immediate correction from the committee but said the company’s appeals were not heeded, with officials being told the burden of proof was on the company. After the election, on Nov. 18, 2020, the committee issued a supplemental report that on Page 16 included a footnote stating: “It appears that the tablet company did not receive the wires, but rather the other entity under the name BAK USA LLC was the recipient of those funds.” Bak said he did not learn of the footnote until May of the following year, when he received a letter from the Grassley’s chief of staff alerting him to it.

The GOP response Johnson spokeswoman Alexa Henning said Johnson stood by the report. “Our report cited information from factual statements in U.S. government records,” said Taylor Foy, a spokesman for Senate Finance Committee Republicans. “We’ve been provided no evidence to change our findings or dissociate Hunter Biden’s financial connections to Devon Archer and Yelena Baturina.” In an apparent reference to the Biden laptop, he added: “In fact, additional evidence has come to light that suggests Hunter Biden and Devon Archer collaborated on financial transactions with Yelena Baturina around the time of the transaction in question, and were involved in additional financial ventures together than had been previously known.” As for BAK USA, Foy said, “Hunter Biden, Devon Archer and their associates would routinely set up multiple corporations with similar names for limited use.” He said that “the committee received angry messages” from “combative” BAK company officials but sought to clarify the record with the footnote in the supplemental report. Bak said as far as he knows, no news organization ever corrected its reporting on BAK USA. “Our old company officially is still identified as the receiver of the funds, if you look it up at the Internet,” he said. “Typical Washington strategy: October surprise on front page and subtraction at Page 11 next to the crossword.”

was sentenced. “I have deep remorse for the victims of the crime.”

Baturina’s deals in Brooklyn Besides the allegation about Hunter Biden, the GOP report made other claims about payments from Baturina to Rosemont Seneca Thornton. But that part of the report showed sloppiness in the reporting and calls into question the thoroughness of the investigation. The report critically misidentified the recipient, mixing up two entities with virtually the same names. The Fact Checker identified the correct owner of the entity that received the funds — and traced the money to real estate purchases in Brooklyn that match a statement by Baturina as well as Archer’s admission that he used Rosemont Seneca Thornton to transfer funds for Baturina for real estate investments in Brooklyn. The Senate report said that “between May 6, 2015 and Dec. 8, 2015, Baturina sent 11 wires in the amount of $391,968.21 to a bank account belonging to BAK USA LLC,” with the transactions listed as “loan agreement.” The report said nine of the transactions, totaling $241,797.14, were sent to a Rosemont Seneca Thornton bank account, which then transferred the money to BAK USA. The report said “BAK USA was a start-up technology company headquartered in Buffalo, N.Y., that produced tablet computers in cooperation with unnamed Chinese business partners.” It turns out there were two BAK USA LLCs, but the one that received the payments had a comma in its name — BAK USA, LLC, which corporate records show was formed on May 28, 2014. In 2016, Baturina issued a statement saying she had opened a representative office in New York to oversee investments in the United States. “Baturina’s company has acquired the first set of commercial buildings next to Barclay’s Centre, a very popular sports and entertainment venue. The company owns the buildings with a total area of 1,500 square meters, and the investment that went into their acquisition totaled US $10 million,” the statement said. New York City real estate records show that BAK USA, LLC, using the same business address as Archer’s firm Rosemont Capital, on June 27, 2014, had purchased two parcels in Brooklyn within a half-mile of Barclays Center. One parcel was bought for about $4.1 million and the other for about $5.4 million, or a total of $9.6 million. The properties had been auctioned by the unclaimed and seized assets program of the United States government. The property records and a property tax bill directed us to Helen Gotman, who is active in New York City real estate. She confirmed to the Fact Checker that she managed the properties on behalf of Baturina. In 2018, the properties were

Daily Mail she was “not interested” in explaining an alleged consultancy fee. Her estranged brother Viktor Baturin claimed to the news organization that “it was a payment to enter the American market.” Baturin, who is reported to be in custody after losing a fraud case filed by his sister, could not be reached for comment. Hunter Biden’s laptop does not contain significant evidence of direct interaction between Hunter Biden and Baturina, according to a review of emails that have been verified by experts working with The Washington Post as well as emails that the experts were unable to verify. Her name, for instance, appears as a possible guest for a 2015 dinner that then-Vice President Biden later briefly visited, according to our reporting, but it’s unclear whether she attended. There’s also no sign of a $3.5 million payment in Hunter Biden’s reported income for 2014, the year of the wire transfer. That year, he reported earning almost $1.25 million, according to information contained in a verified laptop email he sent to his lawyer. The email said $400,000 of the income was related to Biden’s board seat at Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. Archer did a lot of business with Hunter Biden and had originally brought him into the BHR deal. But Archer also had many side deals in that period unconnected to his business with Biden. So doing his own deal with Baturina would appear to be part of that pattern. In February, Archer was sentenced to a year and a day in prison after being convicted of defrauding Native American tribes and various clients in relation to the fraudulent issuance and sale of tribal bonds between 2014 and 2016. “I was doing too many things at once and not paying enough attention,” said Archer before he

Group, run by Jim Bulger, who brought expertise in investing in China. But almost as soon as Rosemont Seneca Thornton was created, the partners decided to dissolve it, according to a person with access to the board minutes. The original structure had added unexpected regulatory burdens to Thornton, and so Bulger’s lawyers advised that the group split up, this person said. Within a year, Chinese corporate records reflected that the foreign investors in BHR were Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC, with 20 percent, and Thornton Group LLC, with 10 percent. Corporate records show Rosemont Seneca Bohai, the replacement corporate vehicle, was formed on Feb. 13, 2014, the day before the Baturina transfer. In theory, for Hunter Biden, Rosemont Seneca Thornton was no more.

RST unexpectedly lives on But Rosemont Seneca Thornton was not dissolved as planned. Four people familiar with the company said that Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, controls it. Archer had kept the vehicle alive for his own real estate business, Rosemont Realty, which raised money from Eastern European and Central Asian investors, two people knowledgeable about his activities said. But he did not inform either Hunter Biden or Bulger, they said. Archer’s secret was exposed when the Senate report was published. Confronted, Archer told Bulger that he had used Rosemont Seneca Thornton to transfer funds from Baturina to purchase real estate in Brooklyn, according to a participant in the conversation. Archer and his attorney, Matthew Schwartz, did not respond to queries. Hunter Biden’s attorney, Chris Clark, declined to comment. Baturina did not respond to emailed questions. When the report was released, she told the

point — and our reporting has unearthed the best explanation about what really happened. It’s a complicated story, involving a web of corporate entities, that eventually leads to the purchase of millions of dollars worth of real estate in Brooklyn by the Russian billionaire. We found no evidence that Hunter Biden was part of those transactions.

A deal in China Let’s start our story in China, where Hunter Biden invested in a private investment fund backed by Chinese state entities at a time when his father was vice president — a controversial move that has raised ethical questions. The allegation that he received this payment hinges on his involvement with a firm called Rosemont Seneca Thornton that initially invested in the fund, generally known as BHR Partners. The report says that on Feb. 14, 2014, Baturina wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, which it said was “co-founded” by Hunter Biden. The payment was listed as “Consultancy Agreement DD12.02.2014,” the report said. The report attributes details on financial transactions to a “confidential document” obtained from the Treasury Department. Johnson and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), then chairman of the F inance Committee, in 2019 had announced they had sought Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) on individuals and entities, including Hunter Biden. SARs are akin to an informant’s tips, not evidence of fraud. Rosemont Seneca Thornton was created on May 28, 2013, according to corporation records, and was incorporated in Delaware, which does not require shareholders or directors to be revealed. But Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, sometimes used “Rosemont” in company names and Biden used “Seneca.” Thornton referred to Thornton

“She [Russian
billionaire Elena
Baturina] gave
him [Hunter
Biden] $3.
million so now I
would think
[Russian
President
Vladimir] Putin
would know the
answer to that. I
think he should release it. I think
we should know that answer.”
— Former president Donald
Trump, in an interview with
Just the News, March 29
“The FBI knew of the laptop,
knew that Hunter received a
$3.5 million wire transfer from
the former mayor of Moscow’s
wife.”
— Sen. Ron Johnson (R-
Wis.), interview on Fox News’s
“Sunday Morning Futures,”
April 3
Less than 50 days before the
2020 presidential election, the
Republican staff of the Senate
Finance and Homeland Security
committees issued a joint report
with a startling claim — that Joe
Biden’s son Hunter had received
a $3.5 million wire transfer from
Elena Baturina, a Russian
billionaire and the widow of the
former mayor of Moscow.
Trump quickly weaponized
the factoid, mentioning it 42
times in the final weeks of the
campaign. He sharply
questioned Biden during the first
presidential debate: “They were
the ones involved with Russia,
turns out not me, it was the
opposite. But why did your son
get three and a half million from
the wife of the mayor of
Moscow?”
An attorney for Hunter Biden
denied the allegation in 2020 but
it has lived on, especially in the
right-wing media. Recently
Trump called on Putin to reveal
what he knows about it.
Trump’s call-out to Putin
inspired us to dig deep into this
story again. We interviewed
people familiar with the
transactions, reviewed property
and real estate documents and
probed for leads in the emails
contained on a hard drive copy
of the laptop Hunter Biden
supposedly left behind for repair
in a Delaware shop in April 2019.
None of our sources would speak
on the record because of
continuing investigations of
Hunter Biden and his business
practices, but we sought
confirmation from corporate
filings and other records.
The flimsiness of the
allegation was apparent from the
start merely by carefully reading
the Senate GOP report itself.
The executive summary offers
a seemingly definitive bullet
point almost exactly the same as
Johnson’s comment: “Hunter
Biden received a $3.5 million
wire transfer from Elena
Baturina, the wife of the former
mayor of Moscow.” But the two
pages in the report that deal with
this transaction are considerably
more nuanced, never saying
outright that Hunter Biden
received this money and making
no claim that any laws were
broken.
The GOP report itself does not
provide evidence to back up the
claim that became a talking

Unraveling the tale of Hunter Biden and $3.5 million wired from Russia

The Fact
Checker

GLENN
KESSLER

MIKHAIL SVETLOV/GETTY IMAGES Elena Baturina with her husband, Yuri Luzhkov, at a state ceremony in M oscow in 2016. A transfer of money by Baturina to the United States became fodder in Republican allegations about Hunter Biden.

BY MARISA IATI

In her blog post titled “How to
Murder Your Husband,” Nancy
Crampton Brophy meticulously
detailed the pros and cons of
various methods: Guns are too
loud. Poison may not work. A hit
man might rat you out to the
police.
The jury tasked with determin-
ing whether she killed her hus-
band is unlikely to hear about any
of it.
A judge in Portland, Ore., ruled
on the first day of Brophy’s mur-
der trial Monday that it would be
unfair for the attorneys in the
case to talk about her 2011 essay.
In it, Brophy said she thinks a lot
about murder because she’s a
romantic suspense writer.
“I find it is easier to wish
people dead than to actually kill
them,” she wrote, according to an
archived version of the post. “I
don’t want to worry about blood
and brains splattered on my
walls. And really, I’m not good at
remembering lies. But the thing I
know about murder is that every
one of us have it in him/her when
pushed far enough.”
The lawyers in Brophy’s trial
have painted opposing pictures of

the months before Daniel Brophy was found dead at his workplace, the Oregon Culinary Institute, in

Prosecutors said the couple
was mired in “financial despair”
with no way out — except, Nancy
Brophy allegedly surmised, fatal-
ly shooting her husband to capi-
talize on an over $1.4 million
life-insurance payout. Her de-
fense attorney countered that the
couple’s finances were improving
before Daniel Brophy’s death and
that Nancy’s Brophy’s gun-supply
purchases were for book research
and in response to news of mass
shootings.
In opening statements Mon-
day, prosecutor Shawn Overstreet
said Nancy Brophy began schem-
ing to kill her husband in late

He said she bought supplies
to make what is known as a ghost
gun, a homemade weapon that’s
meant to be untraceable, but
didn’t know how to build it. So
Brophy allegedly purchased a
9mm Glock pistol while her hus-
band was at work. Overstreet said
she replaced the gun’s slide and
barrel with one ordered on eBay,
making the gun’s ammunition
casings appear not to match the
weapon. And, he said, she prac-
ticed firing at a shooting range.
On June 2, 2018, Overstreet
said surveillance video captured
Nancy Brophy driving near the
culinary institute at about
6:39 a.m. Roughly 40 minutes
later, he said, Daniel Brophy ar-
rived at work. He was filling buck-
ets of ice and water at a commer-

cial sink with his back to the door when his wife allegedly shot him twice, piercing his spine and heart, the prosecutor said. Told by a detective that her husband had been found dead, Nancy Brophy said she had been home all morning. Asked if she owned weapons, she allegedly didn’t mention the ghost gun kit. Four days later, Nancy Brophy asked police for a letter stating that she wasn’t a suspect so that she could collect on her husband’s life insurance policy, Overstreet said. The detective declined. In- vestigators later learned that Bro- phy allegedly made claims on 10 policies and was also eligible for

the equity in their home and a workers’ compensation claim because her husband died at work. Brophy, then 68, was arrested in September 2018 for allegedly carrying out what “she perhaps believed to be the perfect plan, when she ended the life of be- loved chef Daniel Brophy,” according to the prosecution. But Lisa Maxfield, a defense attorney for Brophy, said there’s no way that Nancy Brophy would have done that. Prosecutors were making a “circumstantial” case that asked jurors to ignore the most important circumstance, Maxfield said: that the couple was in a healthy, vibrant marriage for

nearly 25 years. “Nancy Crampton Brophy has always been thoroughly, madly, crazy in love with Daniel Brophy, and she still is today,” Maxfield told the jury. Although money was tight in 2017, Maxfield said the Brophys had formulated a plan to transi- tion toward retirement. Daniel Brophy decided to teach weekend classes at the culinary institute the next year, in addition to his normal weekday classes. He got a part-time job cooking at a reha- bilitation center. The couple planned to subdivide their home. As a result, Maxfield said, the Brophys significantly reduced their credit card debt and the payments due on their mortgage. Their financial situation had significantly improved by June 2018, and they had roughly $10, between them, she said. Maxfield defended the Bro- phys’ multiple life insurance policies as reasonable for a woman who worked as a salesperson for various life insurance companies. Nancy Brophy wanted to demon- strate her confidence in the prod- uct, Maxfield said, and earned a commission on the policies that she sold to herself. So, she said, Brophy had a financial incentive to sometimes add policies. After Daniel Brophy’s death, Maxfield said, his wife scrambled to sell the house before the bank could realize the sole person on the mortgage had died and de- mand full payment. Her grief also

interfered with her job selling Medicare policies, the defense attorney said. Brophy’s weapons purchases could be explained also, Maxfield said. The ghost gun kit and the replacement slide and barrel were research tools for Brophy’s books — successors to the antique doorknobs, law-enforcement quality handcuffs and other items that Brophy previously had bought for her writing. She got the Glock pistol in response to news of several mass shootings, Maxfield said. “Nancy was lost after Dan was killed,” Maxfield said. “Her friends will tell you that she sounded very confused. It was as though the earth had fallen away from her feet.” The trial is expected to last for several weeks, the Oregonian reported. Before her husband’s death, Nancy Brophy published at least seven books with plots that often centered on “wrong” relation- ships that “felt so right.” On the covers, chiseled men mugged for the camera and women glanced seductively over their shoulders. Brophy described herself in an author biography as married to a chef who treats life as a science project. She said she decided to marry him when he told her that he was making hors d’oeuvres before joining her in the bathtub. “Can you imagine,” she wrote, “spending the rest of your life without a man like that?”

‘How to Murder Your Husband’ author on trial, accused of killing husband

DAVE KILLEN/THE OREGONIAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS Nancy Crampton Brophy, left, is charged in the 2018 death of her husband, Dan Brophy. Her defense calls the case “circumstantial.”

Jurors in murder case are unlikely to hear about her 2011 essay

The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-10)

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