Hunter Biden’s ties to China, along with the administration’s conflicts of interest in its climate change agenda, are in the news once again.
Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that an investment firm Biden helped establish had helped a Chinese company purchase one of the world’s richest cobalt mines located in the Congo from a U.S. company. The Washington Free Beacon previously reported on this in January 2020, after months of the Congolese military torching houses and silencing dissent in the region to prevent illegal mining.
The New York Times reported that Biden and the two other Americans who joined Chinese partners in establishing this firm held a 30% stake in it. The firm also helped finance an Australia-based coal mining company controlled by a Chinese government firm and a Chinese company that raised national security concerns to purchase Henniges Automotive, a U.S. auto company “that produces technologies with military applications,” according to Free Beacon reporting from 2019.
It raises even more red flags about Biden’s business dealings with China, as he held a stake in the firm even after his father was inaugurated as president, as the Washington Examiner previously reported. But it also raises another issue with President Joe Biden, going back to his days in the Obama administration.
As the Times notes in its report, cobalt is an important ingredient in batteries for electric cars. And the firm Hunter Biden formed that helped secure that cobalt mine for a Chinese company was formed 10 days after he flew with then-Vice President Joe Biden to China in 2013.
While the corruption of Joe Biden’s younger son is obviously the main story here, the fact that Hunter Biden’s ties to China overlap with the administration’s climate change agenda is also noteworthy. Climate czar John Kerry also had financial ties to China as he brushed aside the country’s human rights abuses in pursuit of climate deals with the Chinese Communist Party.
Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm sat on the board of electric battery producer Proterra and owned more than $1 million in stock options in the company, which Joe Biden and Granholm herself promoted as part of the administration’s infrastructure and climate change policies.
Not only is this another entry in the saga of Hunter Biden profiting off his father’s political influence (and doing so with the world’s worst human rights abuser), but it is yet another case of the swamp of members of the Biden administration with questionable (at best) financial stakes in the administration’s climate change agenda.
