A top aide to President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign is married to a consultant who helped advise Hunter Biden as he faced increased public scrutiny over his lucrative position on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.
Elizabeth Alexander, Communication Director got First Lady Jill Biden, took temporary leave last month to help run the communications department for the Biden campaign.
Alexander previously served as the President’s press secretary when he was in the Senate and while he was Vice President. She then took on the role of senior communications advisor for Biden’s 2020 campaign.
In 2010, Alexander married Yale University lecturer and PR strategist David Wade, who at the time served as Senator John Kerry’s chief of staff and for the State Department under the Obama administration.
Wade left the State Department on June 17, 2015, and a few months later founded consulting firm GreenLight Strategies, according to his LinkedIn profile.
On September 14, 2015, Wade approached Eric Schwerin, the President at Hunter’s now-defunct Rosemont Seneca Partners, to help Hunter and the firm with a “rapid response.”
In an email to Schwerin, Wade queried whether he had been thinking about what the pair discussed “the other day,” a reference to Burisma as would be revealed in subsequent emails.
He suggested it would take him “30 hours or so to do the meetings/conference calls with you and Hunter and anyone else you thought could be helpful.”
Wade described that the calls would discuss “potential issues that might come up,” adding he would follow that up with “raft talking points and back-up documents and quotes – all the collateral documents – to have on hand as a playbook for rapid response.”
Wade requested $10,000 for the services he pitched, and Schwerin forwarded it to Hunter, adding he and Devon Archer were on board with Wade’s proposal.
Archer was also on Burisma’s board with Hunter.
The email to Schwerin followed an exchange earlier that year when Hunter told Wade that he had heard he was moving from the State Department to the private sector and that he was “always just a phone call away.”
Wade replied that if Biden had time, he’d like to “pick” his brain for advice, adding that he was looking forward to catching up.
Then on October 14, 2015, Schwerin emailed Hunter, Wade, and Archer about how they would prepare to respond to multiple questions from The Wall Street Journal.
In the email, Schwerin included a list of potential responses to questions WSJ might ask Hunter.
The email discussed explaining Hunter being in the process of transitioning off the Burisma Holdings board, despite joining the Burisma Geothermal board earlier that year.
Two days later, Schwerin emailed Hunter and Wade about how to respond to questions about “whether there is a conflict of interest with Hunter’s role on the Board vis a vis the VP’s policy.”
The statement the trio drafted included a line about how “Hunter welcomes the scrutiny towards Burisma and its shareholders and is confident that they have operated in accordance with Ukrainian law.”
