The Left-wing activist who founded the legal group responsible for former President Donald Trump’s removal from the Colorado Republican primary ballot was also a prominent defender of Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.
Melanie Sloan, Founder and former Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), repeatedly defended Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings in the media, especially during spring 2014 when Biden joined the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings.
In May 2014, Sloan was featured in a Reuters story about the Obama administration downplaying any ethics concerns surrounding Hunter Biden’s Burisma position. (RELATED: Lesley Wolf Refused To Explain Order To Remove Joe Biden From Search Warrant In Hunter Biden Case)
WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 19: Hunter Biden, son of U.S. President Joe Biden, arrives at the White House December 19, 2023 in Washington, DC. President Biden and family spent the weekend in Wilmington, Delaware. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
“It can’t be that because your dad is the vice president, you can’t do anything,” then-CREW executive director Sloan said. “The most important thing is for Biden not to be speaking about these issues with his dad, and for them to try and draw the lines.” Her remark to Reuters was also used in a Washington Post story published the following day.
The New York Daily News republished the Reuters story and it caught the eye of Hunter Biden’s then-business associate Eric Schwerin, who forwarded him the article, emails on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop archive show.
“Good article. Any article in which Melanie Sloan is on your side is a good one,” Schwerin emailed Biden on May 14, 2014. Eric Schwerin and then-Vice President Joe Biden exchanged over 50 one-on-one emails together, most of them coming in the spring of 2014 when Biden took a trip to Ukraine, email data released by the House Ways and Means Committee shows.
Similarly, she told The Associated Press (AP) in June 2014 “unless there’s solid evidence that Hunter Biden got his job to influence American foreign policy, there’s no clear line that’s been crossed.” Her prior comments were first resurfaced by Natalie Winters, co-host of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.
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Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington was behind Trump’s removal from the Colorado Ballot.
Their founder was also the mainstream media’s go-to source for defending Hunter Biden from corruption allegations.
Even more evidence this is election interference! pic.twitter.com/PbGXIW67Mx
— Natalie Winters (@nataliegwinters) December 27, 2023
Sloan’s quote to The AP later appeared on Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia page after Biden, Schwerin and other business associates worked with public relations firms to soften up its section on Burisma and add positive information about Biden, internet archives from 2015 show.
Burisma paid Hunter Biden over $80,000 per month at the time of Sloan’s comments, bank records show. Then-Vice President Biden ran the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy while his son worked for Burisma.
The firm substantially reduced Hunter Biden’s salary when his father’s vice presidency concluded, according to a federal indictment leveled Dec. 7 against Hunter Biden in California. He is facing nine tax related charges in California and his arraignment is scheduled to take place in January.
Newsweek later featured Sloan’s comments to Reuters in an October 2019 story profiling Hunter Biden’s former business associate and ex-Burisma board member, Devon Archer. At the same time, the Daily Beast contacted Sloan to see if her position on Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings remained the same.
“There’s never been any suggestion that either Biden did anything (pro-actively) to benefit the other. His last name is Biden, it’s not anything his father did,” Sloan told the outlet.
Sloan is now a senior advisor for American Oversight, a left-wing watchdog organization, her LinkedIn page shows. American Oversight did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. Sloan founded CREW in 2003 and left in January 2015 after longtime Clinton operative David Brock took over the organization.
She was a staffer for then-Delaware Democratic Sen. Joe Biden and a former communications officer at Sidwell Friends, the private Washington, D.C., high school where Hunter Biden sent his three daughters with ex-wife Kathleen Buhle. (RELATED: Hunter Biden Did Not Get Overdue Tax Returns Prepared For Months After Getting Sober, Docs Show)
Archer testified before the House Oversight Committee in July and said the Biden family “brand” protected Burisma from legal scrutiny. He recalled 20 instances where Joe Biden spoke with his son’s business associates and a spring 2015 dinner Joe Biden attended alongside Burisma executive Vadim Pozharskyi. (RELATED: The Biggest Question From Devon Archer’s Testimony About The Biden Family Remains Unanswered)
Ep. 13 Part 2. Devon Archer pic.twitter.com/R1sxSuPrKq
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 4, 2023
After his testimony, Archer sat down with Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson and said Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin posed a “threat” to Burisma’s business. Then-VP Joe Biden apparently had Ukraine fire Shokin by threatening to withhold $1 billion worth of funds, an action he bragged about on multiple occasions. (RELATED: Burisma Lobbyists Celebrated ‘Victory Lap’ With Hunter Biden’s Business Associate After Founder Was Let Off, Emails Show)
The Biden family and its business associates hauled in more than $24 million from Ukraine, Russia, China, Romania and Kazakhstan, according to House investigators. The impeachment inquiry into President Biden overseen by House Republicans is ongoing.
CREW is the left-wing legal outfit responsible for building the Colorado case against Trump resulting in the state’s supreme court ruling 4-3 to remove Trump from the ballot for allegedly engaging in insurrection for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
Trump is the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, according to the RealClearPolitics polling averages on the national and state level.
Noah Bookbinder, CREW’s current president and CEO, works for an advisory council inside the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and believes conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should resign.
Trump is appealing the Colorado decision to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, Trump will remain on Colorado’s 2024 Republican primary ballot.