Evidence keeps piling up that Joe Biden lied about his family’s foreign influence-peddling scheme that reaped tens of millions of dollars for his son and brother and potentially put at risk America’s national security.
The president repeatedly has said that he knew “nothing” about his son Hunter’s foreign deals, and yet when he was vice president, he met with Hunter’s foreign business associates, from China, Ukraine, Russia and Mexico, and even chimed in on speakerphone when Hunter was with prospects.
He had dinner with them at Café Milano in Georgetown, played golf with them, invited them to breakfast at the vice presidential residence. He took his son on Air Force Two to countries where Hunter was doing deals.
There are White House logs, photographs and emails to prove it, including on Hunter’s abandoned laptop and in material provided to the FBI by Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of the president’s wayward son.
And now we hear, in the president’s own words on a voicemail, his relief that a New York Times probe of his son and brother Jim’s links to Chinese energy company CEFC had uncovered very little.
“I thought the article released online, it’s going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good. I think you’re clear,” Joe tells his son in the 2018 voicemail discovered in an encrypted iPhone backup on the laptop and published by the Daily Mail.
The New York Times article to which Joe was referring was published on Dec. 12, 2018, part two of an investigation by China hand David Barboza into CEFC and its Chinese military-linked chairman, Ye Jiaming, who had disappeared in China three months after his lieutenant Patrick Ho was arrested at JFK Airport on bribery charges.
Call from clink to Joe bro
The Times had discovered the curious fact that, after his arrest on Nov. 18, 2017, the first call Ho made from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan was to Joe’s brother Jim, Hunter’s uncle.
This was the first public link between the Bidens and CEFC.
Jim told the Times he was surprised by Ho’s call and thought it must have been meant for Hunter. So he simply gave him his nephew’s number.
But Ho knew the number. Hunter and Jim were his business partners and he had Hunter on a $1 million legal retainer.
“There is nothing else I have to say,” Jim told the Times. “I don’t want to be dragged into this any more.”
The Times found more nuggets linking the Bidens to CEFC, noting two meetings, in 2016 and 2017, Hunter had with a Ye aide and with Ye.
The story also dated the start of the relationship to 2015, while Joe was vice president.
“By 2015, Mr. Ye had begun working on perhaps his most politically connected quarry yet: the family of Mr. Biden, the vice president.”
Bobulinski’s disclosures and material on the laptop confirm that the Biden family was indeed doing business with CEFC during Joe’s vice presidency, before a contract was drawn up to formalize the joint venture in 2018.
It’s important to understand that CEFC was not just an energy company. It was the capitalist arm of China’s Belt and Road initiative, President Xi Jinping’s pet project to compromise smaller, strife-torn countries, bribe their officials, buy their energy resources and ensnare them in debt traps, in a bid to overtake the US as the world’s economic superpower.
The Biden partnership was crucial to give CEFC a veneer of respectability abroad, and CEFC paid millions for the luster of the VP’s name attached to its shady projects.
Bobulinski publicly named Joe Biden as the “Big Guy,” referenced in emails on Hunter’s laptop, who was slated to receive 10% equity in the joint venture with CEFC.
Millions to Hunter & Jim
CEFC collapsed a few months after Ho’s arrest. But in 2017, CEFC paid Hunter and Uncle Jim $5 million, and $6 million to Rob Walker, a trusted Biden family friend whose wife, Betsy, was Jill Biden’s assistant.
CEFC’s largesse also extended to a $100,000 line of credit extended by CEFC officials for Hunter and Jim, a 3.14-carat diamond given to Hunter and his expenses totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.
While the contract between the Biden consortium and CEFC was signed in May 2017, after Joe left office, Bobulinski maintains that the money was payment for work done in 2015 and 2016, the last two years of Joe’s vice presidency, using his name to advance China’s Belt and Road in Oman, Luxembourg, Romania, the Middle East and Asia.
In 2017, as also chronicled on the laptop and in Bobulinski’s material, CEFC embarked on a $9 billion acquisition of Russian state oil giant Rosneft. It was China’s biggest-ever investment in Russia, directly brokered between Xi and Vladimir Putin, spelling a concerning shift in geopolitical power to the detriment of America’s national security.
After Ho’s arrest and Ye’s disappearance, the Rosneft deal collapsed.
Spooked by Gray Lady
When the Times started sniffing around the Biden connection to CEFC in 2018, Hunter flew into a panic and accused his partners of leaking.
“The information this reporter has comes directly from James [Gilliar] or you,” Hunter texted Walker.
On Dec. 4, 2018, a few days before the story appeared, Hunter’s attorney George Mesires texted Hunter to reassure him that “Barboza said that there is ‘very little about Hunter [and] no reference to Joe Biden specifically relative to CEFC’s efforts.’ ”
Hunter was thrilled with the story: “you did an incredible job of keeping this basically to a big fat nothing,” he told Mesires.
No wonder Joe was relieved that Hunter was in the “clear.” The whole corrupt enterprise might have been exposed and spoiled his last chance to become president.
The Times didn’t know what a story it had, before Bobulinski and the laptop.
But there is no excuse now for their journalists not to revisit the plethora of new evidence of corruption reported by The Post and a few conservative outlets over the past 19 months.
The president’s lies about what he knew Hunter was up to only compound suspicions.
At present, Republican senators’ inquiries are held up by the Delaware US attorney’s investigation into Hunter’s business deals, which has dragged on for four years.
We know some of Hunter’s business partners and former lovers testified before the grand jury last year, before proceedings wound down.
If the grand jury is still hearing testimony from witnesses, that would explain the delay.
But if an indictment is being slow-walked until after the midterms, that would be another scandal to be investigated.
