Hunter Biden’s Chinese business partners keep quiet in impeachment effort

Hunter Biden is giving evidence to the Congress today but missing from the witness list are the Chinese business partners who funded some of the Bidens’ most lucrative overseas deals.

House Republicans have summoned a succession of figures in their effort to impeach President Biden on the grounds that his family allegedly profited from his political clout. One after another has delivered largely exculpatory testimony, telling investigators the president was never involved in overseas deals that earned family members millions of dollars.

But missing from the Republicans’ witness list are the Chinese business partners who funded some of the Bidens’ most lucrative overseas deals. That has left lawmakers unable to glean deeper insight into why tycoons in China and elsewhere cozied up to the Bidens.

Congressional scrutiny of the family’s business ties intensified on Wednesday when Hunter Biden sat down for a grilling by the Republican-led House Oversight and Justice committees. The committees have subpoenaed several of Hunter Biden’s past associates about the foreign business relationships, including the president’s brother James Biden last week.

China has been a major focus. But congressional subpoena power doesn’t extend overseas, limiting insight into the motivation to do business with Hunter Biden from his former Chinese partners at an oil company and a private-equity firm.

The absence of Chinese voices, as well as those from places such as Ukraine and Romania where Hunter Biden also made money, shows the limits of congressional authority and comes amid ridicule of the inquiry process from Democrats who say it lacks merit.

A spokeswoman for the Oversight committee, acknowledging the limitations of the subpoena power, said the focus has been on people in the U.S. She said that many of the Bidens’ associates, including Chinese Communist Party-linked people who met with Joe Biden, have been arrested, are in China, or are missing.

The impeachment inquiry was undermined earlier this month when a former Federal Bureau of Investigation informant was arrested on charges that he made up allegations of a bribery scheme involving President Biden, Hunter Biden and Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm. The former confidential informant, Alexander Smirnov, lied to his FBI handler by claiming that he had heard from executives associated with Burisma that they paid $5 million each to the president and his son during the elder Biden’s vice presidency, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors allege that those claims were “fabrications,” undercutting corruption allegations related to Burisma that Republicans have long levied against the Bidens.

Republican Matt Gaetz speaks to the press during a break in the closed-door deposition of Hunter Biden. Picture: AFP.

The Wall Street Journal has reported how Hunter Biden and James Biden sought to profit from tycoons in China and elsewhere overseas as Joe Biden’s political star rose. In congressional probes that began before President Biden was elected in 2020 and accelerated with the House impeachment inquiry authorised in December, Republicans have produced bank records, correspondence, testimony and other evidence showing large amounts of money flowing to his family members.

The disclosures have produced no proof that the president earned money alongside his family members or that he made policy decisions that favoured them.

The Bidens and the White House have denied wrongdoing and accused Republicans of twisting facts for political gain. “It seems like the only thing House Republicans are capable of uncovering is more and more evidence that clears President Biden of the false allegations they have been promoting for years,” said White House spokesman Ian Sams.

In his prepared remarks for Wednesday’s closed-door hearing, Hunter Biden denied that Joe Biden had a role in any of his endeavours, and attacked the premise of the hearing. “I did not involve my father in my business. Not while I was a practising lawyer, not in my investments or transactions domestic or international, not as a board member, and not as an artist. Never,” his statement said.

In closed-door testimony last week, James Biden testified that his brother wasn’t involved in his business ventures, saying he always kept his professional life away from their “close personal relationship,” according to a 10-page opening statement obtained by The Journal.

Saying Hello During their testimony, associates of Hunter Biden have provided sprinkles of fresh insight into how he did business alongside moneyed Chinese, with private-equity firm Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management and oil company CEFC China Energy, according to transcripts.

More than one witness referred to a Biden “brand,” for instance. One witness after another has insisted that Joe Biden never had a role in his relatives’ business endeavours, though they recalled instances where he, as vice president and a private citizen, had exchanged pleasantries with their partners.

Rob Walker, a former partner of Hunter Biden, revealed that once when Joe Biden was out of office he stopped by a lunch attended by Ye Jianming, the Chinese oil company’s chairman, while insisting, “Hunter made sure there was always a clear boundary between any business and his father.”

Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer last year revealed that Hunter Biden several times put his father on speakerphone while meeting with associates, once when the chief executive of the Chinese private-equity firm, Jonathan Li, was present. Archer said the subject was pleasantries.

Virtually everyone deposed so far has been an American.

“The committees are interviewing B-grade people,” said Garrett Ziegler, a former Trump administration policy analyst who now runs a private investigation firm called Marco Polo that tries to dig up dirt on the Bidens. To complete the story, Ziegler said the committees should try to question either Chinese partners and any of their family members who might be in the U.S.

China Requests Last week, the committees asked the Justice Department for information about a former insider of China’s CEFC, Patrick Ho, whose New York arrest in late 2017 set in motion the oil company’s demise — and earned Hunter Biden $1 million. A CEFC entity in March 2018 paid Hunter Biden’s law firm Owasco legal fees to assist Ho, who was later convicted in federal court on seven bribery counts associated with his work for CEFC and was deported to Hong Kong in 2020.

Ho hasn’t spoken publicly about his experience or Hunter Biden’s role, and he didn’t respond to emailed questions. CEFC executives have never publicly discussed the firm’s relationship with Hunter and James Biden, and the company itself no longer exists.

In his closed-door testimony last week, James Biden said Hunter Biden had asked him to assist in the CEFC venture, and he agreed partly because his nephew was in the throes of addiction and emotional pain from his divorce and the death of his brother, Beau Biden, from brain cancer.

“I agreed to help, and I hoped that by staying nearby, I could provide Hunter with guidance and additional emotional support,” James Biden said.

James Biden also recalled that, because of his “continued concern for Hunter’s wellbeing,” he agreed to travel with his nephew to Hong Kong to meet with Ho. “After we returned from Hong Kong,” he said, “I learned that Mr. Ho was arrested when entering the United States.” Another Chinese associate Republicans had once hoped to interview was CEFC’s Gongwen Dong, a former banker who lived in a Long Island mansion and handled the oil company’s money in the U.S. A veteran of real estate finance at Citigroup who was known as Kevin, Dong also signed his name to documents that linked the Biden family members to CEFC.

A number of the entities had the words Hudson West in their names and listed as their headquarters Dong’s French chateau-style mansion with a pool and tennis court in Great Neck, N.Y. House Republicans produced documents showing one of those entities, Hudson West III, received nearly $5 million from CEFC starting in 2017 and paid out most of that money to Hunter Biden’s law firm, which then made payments to James Biden.

The monthly payments to the law firm totalled $165,000, initially with $100,000 for Hunter and $65,000 for James Biden, who said he prospected a possible Louisiana liquefied-natural-gas project for the Chinese oil company, which it ultimately failed to capitalise on. In his testimony, James Biden said his share of the monthly payments later increased “when it became clear that I was performing a substantial share of the work.” Dong, though referred to repeatedly in Republican reports, has never spoken publicly. China blocked Dong from leaving the country several years ago as CEFC was collapsing, according to testimony from Mervyn Yan, a U.S. citizen who previously worked closely with CEFC and Dong.

Property records show that Dong in 2021 sold the Great Neck home for $5 million. The home’s buyer said Dong negotiated the sale from China.

Dow Jones