ICE Agent in Sex-Trafficking Unit Donated to GOP and Days Later Investigated Hunter Biden
In the months leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the same ICE sex-trafficking investigator who looked into unproven allegations against Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, made multiple donations to a fundraising platform heavily aligned with former president Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.
Around the time the agent, who was in the child exploitation group of the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit, which is part of ICE, contacted the Delaware State Police (DSP) regarding Biden’s connection to potential crimes, he was repeatedly giving money to WinRed—a controversial GOP small-donations platform that raised millions of dollars in an effort to beat the Biden campaign in 2020.
VICE News first learned of the ICE investigation into Hunter Biden after obtaining a document through a public records request in 2021. The fact that an agent within the Department of Homeland Security, a highly politicized agency throughout the Trump Administration years, was, for no obvious reason, investigating explosive claims against the son of a sitting president’s direct political rival begs the question whether or not it was a politically motivated hack job altogether.
An attorney for Hunter Biden did not respond to requests for comment from VICE News.
DHS refused to answer multiple questions on the investigation, including whether the agent in question decided to look into Hunter Biden on his own volition or was directed to do so by a superior. Though the agent’s name, entire resume, and current occupation is posted on LinkedIn, the agency claimed he was working undercover and could not be named in print. VICE News—which is withholding the agent’s name not due to government requests but because doing so could expose him to harassment from conspiracy theorists—was able to reach the agent on his personal cell phone, but he did not respond to multiple requests for comment. (DHS claimed that attempting to reach him for comment was itself harassment.)
Before and throughout his father’s presidency, Hunter Biden has consistently been a major political target of the GOP, which frequently identifies the failed businessmen and lawyer as a heavy player within his father’s cabal. In reality, though, Hunter is more of a political liability than a major player in President Biden’s orbit. For example, in recent weeks, Hunter—who openly admits to a serious alcohol and crack cocaine addiction—had his iCloud hacked and dumped on 4Chan, revealing a series of embarassing photos and videos of him inebriated and in the company of several sex workers. The story unsurprisingly lit the MAGA universe afire and became tabloid grist for FOX News’s propaganda mill.
Federal campaign finance records show the agent, who according to publicly accessible LinkedIn page is based in New Jersey and works out of the HSI Newark offices, making nine contributions to WinRed between November 2019 and November 2020 averaging $19 apiece. Finance records on the site list the occupation of the agent as “USDHS” or “USDHS/HSI” and his home state as New Jersey.
- Do you know something we should know about why a senior HSI sex-trafficking investigator was looking into Hunter Biden? We’d love to hear from you. You can contact the reporters at ben.makuch@vice.com or tim.marchman@vice.com, or securely via Signal at 267-713-9832.
On October 17, 2020, only days after the New York Post published an explosive and highly controversial story about emails with a Ukrainian energy executive and a sex video it obtained from Hunter Biden’s alleged personal laptop, the agent gave $25 to WinRed. Four days after that, he emailed the DSP looking into “allegations” against Biden, which first surfaced through the former president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giulianni, a well-known peddler of any and all unverified gossip linked to Joe Biden.
“I am assigned to the Human Sex Trafficking/Child Exploitation Group,” wrote the agent—who, according to a review of court filings and public records, is a veteran investigator specializing in cases involving the sexual exploitation of young children—in an email to DSP. “I am looking for a point of contact from the [DSP] in furtherance of the Hunter Biden allegations that may have a nexus in New Jersey.”
DHS was widely regarded as one of the more overtly-supportive departments of the Trump Administration and its political agenda. Last year, a whistleblower alleged that Trump loyalists in leadership positions at the department did the administration's political bidding, and after the results of the presidential election went against him, Trump fired his own DHS cybersecurity czar after he rejected accusations the results were fraudulent.
The New York Times published an investigative report into the misdeeds of WinRed, the Republican response to the successful Democrat platform Act Blue, which pooled millions of unprecedented dollars for President Trump’s financially struggling campaign in the months leading up to the election. The report alleges the Trump campaign made unauthorized withdrawals (which it denied) from unsuspecting supporters that subsequently forced WinRed to make $122.7 million worth of refunds.
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Tim Marchman, Khareem Sudlow
