According to a recent report published by the Wall Street Journal, Justice Department’s probe into Hunter Biden is gaining momentum. 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. Meanwhile, according to the New York Times report, Justice Department is also looking at whether he may have violated money laundering and foreign lobbying laws. Earlier Washington Post in a report claimed, 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 US$5 million in 2017, may have exposed President Joe Biden 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”, Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said this week in a speech on the matter that he delivered on the Senate floor.
Hunter Biden’s 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 Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Johnson in September 2020, which detailed Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ye Jianming. “The financial transactions illustrate serious counterintelligence and extortion concerns relating to Hunter Biden and his family”, the report said.
The GOP report alleged connections between Ye Jianming 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 Jianming and Hunter Biden 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 US$1 million retainer, according to the Washington Post.
In November of that same year, Patrick Ho was arrested by US 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 Washington 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 US 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”.
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 US$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.
Hunter Biden’s Ukraine connections and his father President Joe Biden’s possible discreet involvement in multi-million-dollar bribery and financial benefits gained by his son is now once again coming up prominently in several secret dossiers of the US intelligence. According to a credible source, before this November’s midterm elections, Hunter Biden, his connections with Chinese Communist Party and Ukraine as well as his involvement in money laundering and financial crime may come up prominently in the media, which would jeopardize Joe Biden’s presidency and political future of the Democratic Party.
