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WASHINGTON — This is one piece of Biden family business that the president will welcome airing at the White House.
First son Hunter Biden’s daughter Naomi Biden will hold her wedding reception at her grand-dad’s current address later this year, the office of first lady Jill Biden said Monday.
President Biden and the first lady “will host the wedding reception for their granddaughter Naomi Biden and her fiancée Peter Neal at the White House on November 19, 2022,” Jill Biden’s communications director Elizabeth Alexander said in a statement.
“The First Family, the couple, and their parents are still in the planning stages of all of the wedding festivities and look forward to announcing further details in the coming months.”
It’s unclear if Naomi Biden, 28, will wed Neal, 24, at the White House or at some other venue before the reception.
The first granddaughter works as a lawyer in DC and lives not far from the White House. Neal is from Jackson Hole, Wyo., and is in the final semester of law school at the University of Pennsylvania.
According to the White House, the couple met in New York City four years ago on a date arranged by a mutual friend. Neal proposed during a trip to ritzy Jackson Hole.
Wedding reception costs traditionally are covered by the bride’s parents — though other first families availed themselves of the exclusive venue. President George W. Bush’s daughter Jenna Bush Hager, for example, had a 600-guest party at the White House in 2008 after her Texas wedding.
Father of the bride Hunter Biden, under federal investigation for tax fraud and other crimes, recently paid more than $1 million in taxes in a bid to avoid prosecution.
Hunter Biden resides mostly in Malibu, California, where he rents a mansion for $20,000 per month. The Secret Service rents a mansion nearby for $30,000, ABC News reported Monday.
The first son has faced a barrage of bad news over the past month as the Washington Post and New York Times belatedly confirmed the authenticity of emails on his foreign business deals that The Post first reported in October 2020.
Those emails show Hunter Biden reaping millions from countries where his father held sway as vice president.
The Washington Post reported that the first son and his uncle Jim Biden received $4.8 million from CEFC China Energy. Former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski alleges that he met with Joe Biden to discuss the CEFC venture on May 2, 2017.
A May 13, 2017, email recovered from a laptop that formerly belonged to Hunter indicated that the “big guy” — identified as Joe Biden by Bobulinski — would get a 10 percent equity stake in a corporate entity established with CEFC.
Hunter Biden reportedly paid some of his father’s bills and the extent of his dad’s involvement in his overseas deals is murky.
Hunter Biden held until at least November a stake in the investment firm BHR Partners, which was registered 12 days after Hunter joined then-Vice President Biden aboard Air Force Two for a 2013 trip to Beijing.
The firm played a role in facilitating the 2016 sale for $3.8 billion of a Congolese cobalt from a US company to the firm China Molybdenum. Cobalt is a key component in electric car batteries.
Hunter Biden’s attorney Chris Clark said in November — less than a week after President Biden’s 3 1/2 hour virtual summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping — that his client had finally divested his 10 percent stake in BHR Partners, but offered no further details.
Joe Biden’s claimed in 2019 that he’d “never spoken” with his son about “his overseas business dealings,’ but that statement was contradicted when The Post reported in October 2020 that Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi emailed Hunter in 2015 to thank him for the opportunity to meet his father.
Photos and emails subsequently reported by The Post indicate Joe Biden attended a 2015 dinner at DC’s Cafe Milano with a group of his son’s associates — including Pozharskyi, a trio of Kazakhs and Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, ex-Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov. Baturina is Russia’s richest woman and a 2020 Senate report alleges that she paid $3.5 million to a firm associated with Hunter Biden in 2014.
The troubled first son currently works as an artist — an endeavor through which he’s sought as much as $500,000 for his novice works. The White House arranged for the sales to be anonymous, purportedly to prevent possible influence-peddling, despite the concern of ethics experts that non-transparency actually increases concerns about corruption.
In October, Hunter Biden earned $375,000 from the unknown buyers of five prints of his art ahead of a Hollywood show. It’s unclear if he made additional sales.
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