When Hunter Biden got wire transfers from China, they went to Joe Biden’s address.
In the summer of 2019, while Joe Biden was running for president, the money was rolling into Delaware from Communist China. This was the same Wilmington house where classified documents were lying around while Hunter Biden was living while allegedly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on prostitutes: some of them apparently foreign nationals.
On paperwork, Hunter appeared to claim ownership of the house and in 2010, he had begun paying for the upkeep of the house and his veep dad’s bills. By the time Jonathan Li, the CEO of BHR, was sending a $250,000 wire payment to Joe Biden’s address, the former vice president and future president had already met with the Chinese investment exec doing business with his family and had written recommendation letters for his kids.
The $250,000 Chinese wire was described as a “loan”. But how was Hunter, by then approaching rock bottom, going to pay it off? Where was the money coming from?
The debt was assumed by Kevin Morris, a Hollywood lawyer who has protected and paid for most of Hunter’s needs, after allegedly meeting him at a Joe Biden fundraiser that same year. A whistleblower alleges that in 2021 the CIA tried to block the IRS from interviewing Morris.
When the Biden clan was getting millions in payments from Chinese interests many of which, like Li, Joe Biden had personal contact with, through a web of shell companies, and then portions of the money were passed along to the future president as “loan repayments”, did he really know nothing about the process that brought the money from China to his wallet?
There are two Joe Bidens.
There is the famous passage from Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report stating that “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The phrasing is crucial. It does not state that Biden has a poor memory, but rather that he presents himself.
And there is the other Joe Biden who was on the receiving end of a complex financial scheme. There is the seeming loving father pained by Hunter’s addiction who also used him for money and had him taking all the legal risks while leaving his only surviving son dangerously exposed.
Politicians and public figures are not one person, but two. Biden is the elderly president with a failing mind, who arranged for an unpopular vice president incapable of replacing him. He is the grieving husband who cheated on his first wife, before her death, with his current wife. He is the loving father who dragged his kids into politics from the moment he staged a photo op in the hospital after they were in the accident that killed their mother, and went right on using them.
Joe Biden had spent much of his later career in politics building relationships with China. He could not however directly take advantage of them. That’s what his family was for. They took the risks, they got a bunch of the money and a percentage was to be reserved for the “Big Guy”.
One Biden claimed to know nothing about it while the other cashed the checks.
Biden’s interactions with his brother and son’s clients had been calculated to create an atmosphere of ambiguity into which foreign businessmen could read corrupt implications, without providing any clear evidence of wrongdoing. But would that have been enough?
The underlying question is why would a series of savvy, influential and successful Chinese business leaders have been sending large payments to the Biden family? Had they been taken in by a clever con, of Joe shaking their hands, chatting with them and seeming to imply a connection with the Biden family enterprises without discussing details, and got nothing for it?
How many Chinese businessmen could have fallen for that scam and for how long? And if nothing came from it then why, over a decade later, is there still a Biden financial link with BHR?
The alternative is that the Chinese money men didn’t get conned, the American people did.
The money wasn’t just coming from any companies, but from, in the words of the House Oversight Committee, “Chinese nationals and companies with significant ties to Chinese intelligence and the Chinese Communist Party.” They were not suckers and not stupid. In a cutthroat oligarchy where the price of failure is not just debt, but prison and death, Chinese executives are much sharper, less naive and a whole lot less trusting than any of our own.
It is a safe bet that they knew what they were paying for. And they made sure that they got it.
When Joe Biden was out of office, he was at best a speculative investment, but once he was on the path to the White House, his stock was rising and the Chinese money was buying influence.
30% of BHR had been turned over to Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca firm. Hunter stayed on the BHR board until the fall of 2019. After political pressure, it was announced that Hunter Biden had resigned from BHR, but by 2021, Hunter was still “working to unwind his investment” which were apparently turned over to Kevin Morris who still represents Hunter’s interests.
Backed by the state-owned Bank of China, BHR was not run by fools or suckers. And yet throughout all of Hunter’s publicized troubles the relationship continued and still continues at a distance. And that relationship represents a potential open door for the Bidens and China.
As Joe Biden risks becoming a one-term president, he is in much the same situation that he was in 2016, looking at a career dead end and needing ways to monetize his time in the White House.
Now and then, Biden needs Communist China and China needs Joe Biden.
And so through every Chinese hostile act, including hacks, spy balloons and military brinkmanship, Joe Biden has prioritized China’s interests over America’s. Some critics claim that Joe Biden, like a lot of politicians, is a sucker for maintaining a relationship with China at any cost. But is Joe Biden protecting America’s relationship with China or his own relationship?
American presidents are expected to represent national interests, not personal or foreign ones, but when a politician has a $250,000 wire from China made out to his address, personal interests become foreign ones, presidents become puppets, and policy becomes pay-to-play.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
Photo: danielgreenfield.org
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