by Steven Richards
The documents released by the House Ways and Means Committee last week shed new light on Hunter Biden’s reported interactions with escorts, including his claiming a tax deduction for payments to the women as business expenses. The documents also disclose documentation of investigators considering Mann Act charges.
Contained in the highly redacted documents the House Ways and Means Committee released last Wednesday are an interview with an “escort” identified as Gulnora and with Hunter Biden’s tax accountant who helped him prepare his tax returns for 2017 and 2018.
In spring of 2021, when the IRS investigative team interviewed Jeffrey Gelfound of Edward White & Company who prepared the younger Biden’s delinquent personal and corporate tax returns for 2017 and 2018, they discovered that Hunter Biden identified payments to an “escort” as a business expense.
“[There] is a series of large whole dollar transfers to something called Gulnora?” the DOJ tax agent asked Gelfound, according to the interview transcript. “Do you know what that is?”
“I-I don’t,” Gelfound replied.
“OK – But Hunter verified to you that that was a business expense?” the agent asked. “Yes, we put it on the returns so…” the accountant said.
The tax returns were delinquent when Gelfound was brought on to help complete them. Hunter Biden verified to him that two payments to Gulnora were business expenses—on August 14 and September 4, 2017 for $1500 and $2700.
In an email obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop archive, Wells Fargo sent an alert to the younger Biden notifying him that he added a new recipient to Zelle—an app used to send payments—named Gulnora Djamalitdinova.
The same day, Wells Fargo notified Hunter Biden that Gulnora was also added as a “Wire Transfer recipient.”
In 2017, Hunter Biden “earned substantial income” and in 2018 he “[earned] handsomely and spend wildly” according to his now-scrapped plea agreement. Overall, Hunter Biden received about $5.5 million in total from Chinese sources, the board of Burisma, and other business interests, according to Exhibit 1 of the plea agreement. After a different accountant prepared the original returns for those years, Hunter Biden failed to submit them.
In his closed door testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee this summer, whistleblower Ziegler identified tens of thousands of dollars in payments that Hunter Biden made to prostitutes and a sex club. These payments were deducted as business expenses on his tax returns, the payments to Gulnora among them.
“I have included a redacted excerpt of that interview of an escort by the name of Gulnora that was conducted on or about April of 2021 in which she admits to meeting RHB relating to escort work,” IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler wrote in his first affidavit to the committee, which was made public last week.
The interview transcript gives a first hand look into this dark and tumultuous period in Hunter Biden’s life, characterized by profligate spending on sex workers and heavy drug use while he raked in millions from foreign sources in Ukraine, China and elsewhere.
The escort, identified by the documents as Gulnora, told investigators that her manager “booked her an escort job with Robert Hunter Biden, which was her first escort job,” according to the interview memo released by the committee.
When the escort arrived to meet Hunter Biden “somewhere in West Hollywood” she asked him to confirm his identity. She described his ID card as “weird,” an ID that was not from California, according to the memo. After the escort’s manager asked Hunter Biden to provide another form of identification, he provided a “global ID,” according to the escort.
Gulnora told investigators that “Hunter Biden told her that his father was the Vice President and asked [redacted] to Google search his name.” After the escort told Hunter that she just wanted to be paid, he showed her a photo of his father, Joe Biden, with President Obama. This made the escort uncomfortable and “she became afraid.”
When she returned home after the visit to Hunter Biden and when she told her friend who she had been with, her friend told her “you have no idea who you’re dealing with.” After this, Gulnora deleted Hunter Biden’s phone number. The escort told investigators that she only ever engaged with two clients for that manager, Hunter Biden and one other.
Yesterday, the Daily Mail reported it reviewed new Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) from the Treasury Department that purportedly show Hunter Biden’s accounts being monitored as late as December 2019 and linked payments from those accounts and his business accounts to an “Eastern European prostitution ring.”
According to the Daily Mail, Wells Fargo identified 25 individuals linked to the foreign prostitution ring and about $7 million in suspicious transactions, including checks from Hunter Biden that “may have been falsified to hide his payments to hookers from his business account.” A SAR is required to be filed within 30 days of a bank identifying facts that may constitute money laundering activity or a violation of the Bank Secrecy Act.
Another bank, Morgan Stanley, also identified suspicious financial activity related to Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer as far back as 2015 in the fraudulent tribal bonds scheme in which Archer was later convicted.
These new documents confirm the testimony from that IRS whistleblowers provided to Congress on Hunter Biden’s prostitution payments.
The whistleblowers testified that potential Mann Act violations were referred to the Justice Department, testimony that was confirmed by the release of the documents by the committee. The Mann Act prohibits the transport across state lines of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense.”
Whistleblower Joseph Ziegler, a former IRS Special Agent provided an email chain to the committee where Jack Morgan from the DOJ Tax Division attached some of the relevant documents “related to SM and solicitation.” The investigator highlighted individual records that were “most probative for Mann Act purposes,” according to the email. Hunter Biden appears to have paid for “likely” escorts to travel across the country at least three times: Los Angeles to Boston, New York to Boston, and New Jersey to New York.
Ziegler, along with Gary Shapley, another former IRS agent who is a whistleblower, have been attacked by Hunter Biden’s legal team. Biden attorney Abbe Lowell has previously contended that both broke federal law when making protected disclosures to Congress and reportedly urged the Department of Justice to pursue legal action against the pair.
“From what I recall, the Mann Act violations (Human Trafficking charges and evidence) were referred by the assigned prosecutors to another investigative team outside of Delaware but I was not a part of that process and do not know what ultimately happened,” Ziegler told the committee. “I know that the evidence related to the potential Mann Act violations came up by the assigned prosecutors at multiple times during the course of the investigation.”
“There were multiple examples of prostitutes that were ordered basically, and we have all the communications between that where he would pay for these prostitutes, would book them a flight where even the flight ticket showed their name,” Gary Shapley, one of the IRS whistleblowers, testified to Congress in May. “And then he expensed those,” on his tax forms.
“And then there were — and I know that my counsel brought this up earlier. There were some flying people across State lines, paying for their travel, paying for their hotels,” Joseph Ziegler testified. “They were what we call Mann Act violations.”
“And were those Mann Act violations referred to the Justice Department?” a committee investigator asked.
“I know that they were compiling them together. I don’t know what they ended up doing with them. I know there was an effort at some point to compile them, but I don’t know what ultimately happened with them,” Ziegler said.
Abbe Lowell—attorney for Hunter Biden—did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News.
The 2017 and 2018 tax violations associated with these payments occurred while Hunter Biden was living in California. To date, charges against Hunter Biden for the violations during these years have not been brought. The IRS whistleblowers told congressional investigators that U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada in California denied U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss’ request to bring the tax charges in the state.
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Steven joined Just the News in August 2023 after previously working as a Research Analyst for the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) in Tallahassee, Florida.
