Bidens’ China connection has potential to damage national security
Disturbing questions have been raised over Hunter Biden’s trip with dad Joe — then US vice president — on Air Force Two to China in December, 2013, for an eight-day visit with Communist Party grandees, writes Miranda Devine.
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The Biden family’s ties to corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma are disturbing enough. But it is the China connection that has most potential to damage the security interests of America and its ally Australia.
Emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop implicate his father, former vice president Joe Biden, in an international cash-for-influence scandal.
The New York Post has published emails and photographs from Hunter’s laptop, which he abandoned after dropping it off at a repair shop in Delaware in April 2019.
In a second instalment released overnight, evidence emerges of some of Hunter’s lucrative business deals in China, after he was introduced to senior Communist Party officials by his father. He describes one deal as “interesting for me and my family” in an email.
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Another email, sent to Hunter on May 13, 2017, with the subject line “Expectations”, included details of “remuneration packages” for six people involved in an unspecified business venture.
Biden was identified as “Chair/Vice Chair depending on agreement with CEFC” — an apparent reference to the former Shanghai-based conglomerate CEFC China Energy Co.
His pay was pegged at “850” and the email also noted that “Hunter has some office expectations he will elaborate”.
The email outlines a “provisional agreement” under which 80 per cent of the “equity”, or shares in the new company, would be split equally among four people whose initials correspond to the sender and three recipients, with “H” apparently referring to Biden.
The agreement also listed “10 Jim” and “10 held by H for the big guy?”
Neither Jim nor the “big guy” was identified further.
But speculation abounds.
Disturbing questions about Joe Biden have been raised over Hunter accompanying his father on Air Force Two to China in December 2013 for an eight-day visit with Communist Party grandees, after which Hunter scored an investment deal reportedly worth as much as $1.5 billion with a subsidiary of the Bank of China.
Joe has always denied his son’s business activities ever influenced US policy. But on even the most neutral basis, it is ethically compromising for the son of a vice-president and presidential candidate to be engaging in financial transactions with foreign governments, especially with our most potent strategic foe.
As the Obama administration’s point man for China, Joe Biden has boasted about the amount of face time he has had with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“I’ve spent more time in private meetings with Xi Jinping than any world leader,” Biden told the Council for Foreign Relations in 2018.
“I have 25 hours of private dinners with him, just he and I, and one interpreter.”
Biden was sent to China in 2013 on a number of missions, including to persuade Xi to stop militarising the South China Sea by building man-made islands. He failed spectacularly.
Throughout his vice presidency Biden steered America into a position of sycophancy with China, missing the strategic threat it posed to our interests and those of our allies, like Australia, Japan and Taiwan.
As a presidential candidate, he has not changed his tune. Last May Biden declared China was “not competition” for the US.
It is wilful blindness, at best, for a senior politician not to perceive the threat of China.
The fact that Biden’s son is embroiled in multimillion-dollar financial deals with Chinese state-owned enterprises suggests something more sinister may be afoot.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph