A photo shows Joe Biden with a pair of his troubled son’s business associates from Kazakhstan in what appears to be the same Washington, DC, power-dining spot where Hunter Biden introduced the future president to his overseas cronies.
Online photos of the interior of Cafe Milano match the background of the shot that shows the Bidens smiling while flanked by Kazakhstani oligarch Kenes Rakishev and Karim Massimov, a former prime minister of Kazakhstan.
Meanwhile, President Biden was described to The Post as a regular at the restaurant, which touts itself as “Where the world’s most powerful people go.”
Hunter Biden worked with Rakishev — who has family ties to the regime of former Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev — to find US investments for his $300 million-plus fortune between 2012 and 2014, the Daily Mail has reported.
The unverified image of the Bidens, Rakishev and Massimov was posted online in 2019, according to a website timestamp, by the Kazakhstani Initiative on Asset Recovery, which didn’t say where or when the photo was shot.
But on Wednesday, The Post exclusively revealed that Joe Biden met with Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakhstani business associates in Cafe Milano’s “Garden Room” on April 16, 2015, while he was vice president under President Barack Obama.
The guest list for the event included “3 seats for our KZ [Kazakhstan] friends,” according to an email Hunter Biden sent to his then-business partner Devon Archer three weeks earlier.
Those invitees weren’t identified further, but Archer was invited to a “small private breakfast” in Massimov’s suite at the Willard Hotel the morning of the gathering, another email shows.
“There are several matters the Prime Minister is eager to discuss with you and he will be grateful for the opportunity to spend quality time together,” that email said.
And a third Kazakhstani delegation member, banker Marc Holtzman, emailed Hunter Biden following the gathering.
“Deer [sic] Hunter, Thank you for an amazing evening, wonderful company and great conversation. I look forward to seeing you soon and to many opportunities to work closely together,” wrote Holtzman, then the chairman of Kazkommertsbank, Kazakstan’s largest bank.
The following year, Hunter Biden described Massimov as a “close friend,” according to another email.
Hunter Biden has acknowledged struggling with drug addiction and alcoholism, including during his father’s winning 2020 White House bid, during which he stormed out of an intervention staged by his dad and other family members.
“I thought, ‘I need to figure out a way to tell him that I’m gonna do something, so that I can go take another hit,’” he told CBS This Morning last month.
“It’s the only thing I could think, literally.”
The digital correspondence is contained on a hard drive that holds the contents of a laptop computer that was left at a repair shop in the Bidens’ hometown of Wilmington, Del., in April 2019 and never retrieved, the store’s owner has told The Post.
The MacBook Pro was seized by the FBI in December 2019, apparently in connection with what Hunter Biden claimed last year is a probe of “my tax affairs” by federal authorities in Delaware.
Last month, Hunter Biden said his lawyers were “being completely cooperative” but denied they were negotiating a plea deal for him.
The White House didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
