Wikipedia, the online user-generated encyclopedia, has deleted an entry detailing the investment firm that President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden helped create.
On Saturday, the New York Post first reported the deleted Wikipedia entry for investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners. Wikipedia currently lists the investment firm under its “Articles for deletion” section.
Wikipedia — which describes itself as an online encyclopedia “where everyone can freely share and access all available knowledge” — said the entry for Rosemont Seneca Partners is being deleted because it is “not notable.”
“This organization is only mentioned in connection with its famous founders, Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz,” a Wikipedia editor identified only as AlexEng wrote on March 31.
Rosemont Seneca Partners was founded by the younger Biden, Heinz and Devon Archer. In February, Archer was sentenced to more than a year in prison on federal charges of attempting to defraud a Native American tribal entity in a case that did not involve Hunter Biden. On March 28, the Wall Street Journal reported a federal tax investigation is looking into payments cash transfers from a Rosemont Seneca entity to Hunter Biden, as well as the purchase of a car for his use.
In 2020, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) reported that Ukrainian-Syrian businessman Hares Youssef invested $2.98 million into a now-defunct technology startup called “mbloom” in 2015. OCCRP further noted Youssef is suspected of holding ties with Russian organized crime. The mbloom startup was jointly financed by Hawaii’s Strategic State Development Corporation and Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP), then run by Archer.
Hunter Biden’s representative George Mesires told OCCRP that Biden had “severed his relationship” with RSTP prior to the mbloom investment. OCCRP reported financial records still showed money from mbloom flowed into a bank account operated by Archer, which was making regular payments to Biden at the time. OCCRP asked Mesires whether any of the payments to Biden were connected to the mbloom project but he did not respond.
AlexEng said keeping the Rosemont Seneca Partners entry up ran the risk of the page becoming “a magnet for conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.”
In response to AlexEng’s explanation for the deleted entry, one Wikipedia commenter said, “If someone were to read about a Hunter Biden ‘conspiracy theory’ on the internet, wouldn’t it be helpful if they could read some actual facts about it on wikipedia? Or is it better to let the conspiracies rule the internet unchallenged?”
A Wikipedia editor with the handle KidAd said “it is not Wikipedia’s role or responsibility to fact-check or ‘correct the record’ in any way. Wikipedia is based on reliable sources, though not every news story or controversy is notable enough for its own article.”
In addition to removing the entry for Rosemont Seneca Partners, Wikipedia also rejected arguments to merge information from the entry with Hunter Biden’s own official Wikipedia page.