OPINION:
On a trip to China in 2011, then-Vice President Joe Biden went before Sichuan University students and talked of a day when their countrymen would operate in virtually every American power center, from schools and laboratories to the U.S. government.
He said, “In order to cement this robust partnership, we have to go beyond close ties between Washington and Beijing, which we’re working on every day, go beyond it to include all levels of government, go beyond it to include classrooms and laboratories, athletic fields and boardrooms.”
Who knew then that this Biden-sponsored infiltration would include the Biden family “boardrooms”?
It was not long after the speech that the Biden family began cashing in on China.
Son Hunter Biden was already in the middle of shuttling to Chinese money centers. He had visited in 2010 and again a few months before his dad’s Sichuan speech. Sending a clear father-son message, the Bidens traveled aboard Air Force 2 in 2013. The vice president met with one of Hunter’s benefactors, banker Jonathan Li, who at the time was working with Hunter to form a private equity firm.
In all, Hunter ranked in millions of dollars from associates connected with the Chinese Communist Party. In emails from his abandoned laptop computer, he said that he shared the proceeds with the family.
Rep. James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who heads the House Oversight Committee, validated Hunter’s words. Last week he released subpoenaed bank records that showed how Chinese cash arrives in this country and gets distributed to the Biden clan.
President Biden, whose oral autobiography is his personal fantasy camp, immediately said the validated report was not true. He has also looked reporters in the eye and said he has never discussed Hunter’s foreign business dealings with Hunter. We all know this is a false statement.
Mr. Comer said his China staff report is the first of more than a dozen examples of Biden family/Chinese cash.
In 2020, two GOP senators, Charles Grassley and Ron Johnson, issued a groundbreaking report on Biden’s family finances. Their report, using Treasury Department Suspicious Activity Reports, revealed how Hunter has collected millions of dollars from China and Russian and Ukraine oligarchs.
Mr. Comer has added a new wrinkle. In this one slice of what Mr. Comer has called Biden family influence peddling, the Chinese State Energy HK Ltd., an electric power company, wired $3 million to Rob Walker. a business partner of Hunter’s and a Biden family friend. The money arrived on March 1, 2017, roughly six weeks after the elder Biden’s term as vice president ended.
The next day, Mr. Walker wired $1.065 million to James Gilliar, another Hunter associate whose name shows up in laptop email traffic. Over the next three months, Biden family members received cash shares wired to various banks for Hunter Biden; Joe Biden’s brother James; and Hallie Biden, widow of Joe Biden’s eldest son, Beau.
In March 2017, two years after Beau died of brain cancer, Hunter and Hallie were living together.
And there is a mysterious $70,000 wire to a bank account in the name of “Biden.”
We know what everyone is wondering. Is “Biden” Joe?
A Comer staff memo suggests that Mr. Walker is the Biden disbursement hub. For example, in 2015, when the elder Biden was vice president, Mr. Walker received a wire transfer of nearly $180,000 from an overseas company the committee has not yet identified. Days later, he wired Hunter $59,900.
Perhaps forgotten in the hubbub over Mr. Comer’s press release is the 2020 Biden family blockbuster by Sens. Grassley and Johnson.
In their reporting, the Biden family financial paymaster was a pass-through firm called Hudson West III LLC, created in 2017 by Hunter and Gongwen Dong. He was the facilitator for the ultimate money man, Chinese tycoon Ye Jianming and his multibillion-dollar China Energy Co., or CEFC. Hunter himself said so in an email bemoaning that Mr. Ye had disappeared in 2018 and his company collapsed.
In August 2017, Hudson West received $5 million from a CEFC-linked firm. Hudson then sent $4.8 million to Hunter’s law firm, Owasco, in 2017-18. Owasco then sent payments to James Biden, Joe’s brother, totaling $1.4 million for consulting fees.
Hudson West also issued credit cards to James and his wife, Sara, for a $100,000 global shopping spree, according to Messrs. Grassley and Johnson.
Weeks after the 2013 trip to China, where the vice president met with Mr. Li, Hunter and Mr. Li merged his Rosemont Seneca with a Li creation, Bohai Harvest, to become BHR. Hunter received no cash but a 10% stake.
Both before and after Mr. Biden’s 2011 speech in China pledging far-reaching integration, Hunter made five trips to China hunting up money during the vice presidency, according to records obtained by Judicial Watch.
In 2010, he was among a delegation of associates who visited Chinese firms looking for investors. He returned in 2011 and in June 2013, six months before the Air Force 2 visit where his father met with Mr. Li. Hunter returned to China in 2014 and again the next year.
As president, has Mr. Biden done any favors for the expansionist, money-swelled Chinese Communist Party?
He sold them our emergency oil reserves at a time of rising prices.
He never talks of holding the communist regime accountable for lying and covering up the COVID-19 pandemic that spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to kill 6.8 million worldwide, including 1 million Americans.
In June 2021, Mr. Biden reversed former President Donald Trump’s executive order that effectively banned the use of TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform that spies on us by collecting mass personal data while polluting the brains of children.
In February 2022, Mr. Biden shut down a 2018 Trump counterespionage program, the China Initiative, aimed at its thousands of spies who try to steal U.S. innovations.
That same month, 150 faculty at Penn University wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding he end the “China initiative.” Penn is home to Mr. Biden’s personal think tank, the Penn Biden Center, which is funded by the communist Chinese regime.
In January 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray traveled to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California to deliver a speech on our chief foreign threat today: communist China.
“That’s what I want to talk to you about tonight, the threat posed by the Chinese government here at home to our economic security and to our freedoms,” he said. “Our freedom of speech, of conscience; our freedom to elect and be served by our representatives without foreign meddling; our freedom to prosper when we toil and invent. … China’s government has the global reach and presence of a great nation, but it refuses to act the part and too often uses its capabilities to steal and threaten.”
There was no talk of inviting communists into U.S. boardrooms.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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