Investigations turn up the heat on Hunter Biden

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Further proof emerged this week of a financial relationship between President Biden’s son Hunter, the president’s brother James and a Chinese company with reportedly close ties to that country’s ruling Communist Party.

In addition, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that the Justice Department’s probe into Hunter Biden is gaining momentum. He acknowledged last December that federal investigators were looking at his taxes. But the New York Times reported in March that the Justice Department is also looking at whether he may have violated money laundering and foreign lobbying laws.

Meanwhile, allegations that Russian disinformation may have produced or manipulated emails found on a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden at a computer repair shop in 2019 were debunked by the Washington Post.

Hunter Biden speaks via video during the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
Hunter Biden speaks via video during the 2020 Democratic National Convention. (2020 Democratic National Convention/Pool via Reuters)

No clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden has emerged. But this week Republicans resurrected questions they have raised for years: whether Hunter Biden’s dealings with CEFC China Energy, the Chinese company that paid him and his uncle around $5 million in 2017, may have exposed the president to potential conflicts of interest with regard to the Chinese government.

“We may never know all the details of the Biden family foreign entanglements, or the full extent to which those entanglements compromise our current president,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said this week in a speech on the matter that he delivered on the Senate floor.

While Johnson’s remarks are speculative, Hunter Biden’s actions over the past decade have provided plenty of reason for such speculation.

His extensive connections to a Chinese businessman named Ye Jianming, the founder of CEFC, have been reported in the past.

“Hunter Biden received millions of dollars from foreign sources as a result of business relationships that he built during the period when his father was vice president of the United States and after,” read a report released by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Johnson in September 2020, which detailed Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ye. “The financial transactions illustrate serious counterintelligence and extortion concerns relating to Hunter Biden and his family,” the report said.

Republican Sen. Charles Grassley questions Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearing.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, questions Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearing on March 22. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The GOP report alleged connections between Ye and the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese military. The New York Times in 2018 reported that CEFC was one of the few “Chinese companies to receive Beijing’s approval to chase splashy deals at a time when the government has mostly restricted overseas acquisitions.” A supplemental report by Grassley and Johnson two weeks after the presidential election detailed further links between Ye and Hunter and James Biden.

This week, Johnson and Grassley released documents showing receipts of millions of dollars of payments from CEFC to Hunter and James Biden beginning in August 2017. That September, Hunter Biden signed an agreement to represent Patrick Ho, who worked for CEFC, for a $1 million retainer, according to the Washington Post.

In November of that same year, Ho was arrested by U.S. federal agents in New York. He was found guilty by a jury a year later of bribing African government officials to secure their approval of energy contracts.

The Washington Post also reported that security experts had verified the validity of some emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Those emails were first reported in the fall of 2020 by the New York Post, which said that the computer had been left at a computer repair shop in 2019.

But with the presidential election two weeks away, Twitter blocked users from accessing the Post article for two days after its release, citing a policy against allowing the publication of hacked material. After an uproar, Twitter unblocked the article, but not before Republicans accused the tech giant of trying to meddle in the election.

Following the release of the New York Post report, a host of former diplomats and U.S. intelligence officials released a letter stating that the article “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” even as they acknowledged that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”

President Biden delivers remarks on gas prices from a podium at the White House.
President Biden delivers remarks on gas prices at the White House on Thursday. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The Biden campaign echoed the charges of Russian disinformation at the time. But the debunking of the Russian disinformation accusation now has led conservatives to claim that the incident showed liberal bias in the media and at the Big Tech companies.

The New York Post article in 2020 focused on Hunter Biden’s dealings with a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, and implied that Joe Biden’s diplomacy in Ukraine during his time as vice president was influenced by his son’s financial interests.

Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma in 2014 despite having little experience in the energy sector or Ukraine, and he was reportedly paid up to $50,000 a month by the company. He left it in 2019.

President Donald Trump was impeached in 2019 for pressuring the Ukrainian government and its newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to dig up dirt on the Bidens. Trump, in turn, accused Joe Biden of pressuring the Ukrainians to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, using his influence as vice president to help his son’s business interests. These claims fell apart upon closer examination.

However, a few days after the Post published its article in 2020, an ex-business partner of Hunter Biden accused Joe Biden — then a candidate for president — of being involved in his son’s dealings with CEFC. Anthony Bobulinski said he took part in a meeting in Los Angeles in 2017 where Joe, James and Hunter Biden were all present and an investment deal with CEFC was discussed.

Bobulinski also provided emails to the Wall Street Journal that purportedly showed another business partner, James Gilliar, sent him a message in May 2017 discussing how each partner in the deal with CEFC would be compensated. The email said three partners — Hunter Biden, Rob Walker and Bobulinski — would receive 20%, with James Biden getting 10%.

And then the email said, “10 held by H for the big guy?”

Joe Biden embraces his son Hunter at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., in 2020.
Joe Biden embraces his son Hunter at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., in 2020. (Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images)

Bobulinski, who made his statements at an event hosted by the Trump campaign less than two weeks before the presidential election, said that the “big guy” was Hunter Biden’s nickname for his dad and that it was clearly a reference to Joe Biden. “The Biden family aggressively leveraged the Biden family name to make millions of dollars from foreign entities even though some were from Communist-controlled China,” Bobulinski told the New York Post.

The energy project under discussion in the emails provided by Bobulinski never panned out. But CEFC paid Hunter Biden $3.8 million for consulting and a $1 million retainer fee.

The Biden administration has insisted that President Biden “has never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any overseas business whatsoever.”

Hunter Biden has spoken publicly over the last several years about his previous addictions to alcohol and drugs. His ex-wife Kathleen Buhle alleged in divorce papers in 2017 that he “created financial concerns for the family by spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations), while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.”

CEFC founder Ye, meanwhile, has not been seen since he was taken into custody by the Chinese government early in 2018.

Joe Biden, who has repeatedly defended Hunter, has joined the company of other American leaders who have been put in a tight spot by family business dealings. Presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, to cite just three examples, were all accused by rivals of allowing family members to profit from their political connections.