The extent of Chinese government infiltration of our governing system is appalling.
The extent of Chinese government infiltration of our governing system is appalling.
E ven more than usual, everyone should read Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt from Wednesday, about the appalling extent of Chinese government infiltration of our governing system (at the state and federal levels) and society. Jim is right, of course, to observe that few publications or news organizations — at least as of this writing — have picked up on the Washington Post’s reporting about the widespread violence orchestrated by Chinese government agents when, under their influence, San Francisco rolled out the red carpet for Xi Jinping’s appearance at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last November.
Nevertheless, we are inured to this by now. After all, if the media–Democrat complex yawns over evidence that the president himself was bought by Beijing, why would anything else spur our curiosity?
In August, the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees issued the 291-page report of their impeachment inquiry into President Biden. When Hunter Biden pled guilty to tax charges this week — to failing to pay his “fair share” on the millions he raked in by monetizing his father’s political influence — the report was a useful reminder of why the last thing Democrats needed was a corruption trial in the run-up to Election Day. It establishes, with incontestable banking-records corroboration (in addition to witness testimony), that, of the $27 million the Biden family influence-peddling scheme took in from agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes, a whopping $7,283,188.76 was traceable to agents of Xi’s regime and the Chinese Communist Party. (See Report, chart at pp. 29–30.)
Note that, notwithstanding China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in December 2001, it is a totalitarian Communist dictatorship with unconcealed ambitions to be a regional and, ultimately, global hegemon. There are no private businesses in China, as we understand that concept in the West. The major conglomerates are arms of the state. Even the most modest business entities are monitored by the state and expected, on demand, to provide the regime with their data, including intelligence about foreign business partners and their most closely held trade secrets.
The Bidens were principally involved in two schemes, both of which involved peddling Joe Biden’s political influence while (and for a time after) he was Barack Obama’s vice president.
The first scheme was an investment vehicle, Bohai Harvest RST, which joined a Hunter Biden-directed entity together with a consortium led by a Beijing investment banker, Jonathan Li. The consortium included the Bank of China, the state-controlled postal savings and development banks, and a Chinese pension fund. The Bohai business relationship was finalized when Hunter hitched a ride on Air Force Two to Beijing, where he introduced Li to his father, the then-vice president, who was there for extensive talks with Xi. (Joe Biden later wrote letters to try to help Li’s children get into Ivy League schools. That revelation came at a time when Biden was still risibly denying any involvement with his son’s business associates.)
Lo and behold, by the time the Bidens got back home, Bohai was up and running. I’ve previously described its achievements as follows:
Because of its close connections to the Xi Jinping regime and the Chinese Communist Party, Bohai has the inside track on opportunities not available to ordinary investors. And with the American heft of the “Biden brand,” it has scored big deals that Americans would find alarming if the media covered them as they would nonstop if Republicans were involved – e.g., a $3.8 billion cobalt mine in Africa (cobalt being essential for the batteries of the electric vehicles the Biden administration is trying to make us all drive), as well as the purchase of Henniges Automotive, which enabled the military forces of America’s most challenging geopolitical foe to acquire valuable anti-vibration technology. Moreover, Bohai made a killing when it sold its investment in China’s top battery manufacturer (Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd., or CATL) for $30.1 million — nearly twice what Bohai had paid for it two years earlier.
Hunter acquired a 10 percent stake in Bohai, which he has transferred, under murky circumstances, to Kevin Morris, the Hollywood lawyer and “sugar bro” who gave the younger Biden millions of dollars so he could pay off his tax liabilities — the liabilities relevant to Hunter’s aforementioned tax crimes. (For more on the transfer of the Bohai stake to Morris, see e.g., here, here, here, and here.) Publicly, the 10 percent stake has been valued at $420,000, which is laughable (that’s just 10 percent of the original capitalization of the venture, not its present value). As investigative journalist Peter Schweizer has reported (based on an analysis by University of Chicago finance expert Steven Kaplan):
A private-equity fund such as Bohai, with over $2 billion under management, will typically generate hundreds of millions of dollars in fees over its lifespan. Consequently, a 10 percent stake in it could be worth several million dollars — it is impossible to say exactly how much because such assets are ultimately worth whatever a buyer is willing to pay in an arms-length sale.
The Bidens’ second China scheme was a partnership with CEFC, a Chinese energy conglomerate that was led by Xi protégé Ye Jianming. CEFC was functionally run by the Chinese Communist Party, was financially backed by the Bank of China, and operated as a regime intelligence operation.
None of this is hyperbole. Ye was an official emissary for Xi, including to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and the Bidens themselves referred to Ye as Xi’s protégé. CEFC was threaded with regime officials and conducted joint activities with the People’s Liberation Army (e.g., it funded a center for applied psychological operations and propaganda against Taiwan). And one of its top executives, Patrick Ho (Ho Chi-ping), was famously dubbed by Hunter “the f***ing spy chief of China.”
Eventually, Ho was prosecuted by the Justice Department on foreign-corruption charges — a criminal proceeding during which DOJ disclosed that Ho and CEFC had been the subjects of national-security monitoring under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It was just days after the U.S. government’s February 8, 2018, disclosure of the FISA surveillance that the Xi regime whisked Ye into custody in China. He has never been seen publicly again. Beijing subsequently wound CEFC down and allowed it to go bankrupt.
All that was after the Bidens had reeled in millions, as I recounted in detail here. This haul includes the millions CEFC paid up after Hunter’s notorious WhatsApp message to a CEFC executive:
I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang [i.e., CEFC executive director Zhang Jianjun], or the chairman [i.e., Ye Jianming], I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every single person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.
The Bidens’ China score also includes a cool $1 million paid to Hunter to represent Ho as an attorney when it became clear that the FBI and federal prosecutors were closing in. Hunter has a law degree (though he lost his license after recently being found guilty of felony firearms offenses), but he was mainly a lobbyist pretending not to be a lobbyist who did not practice much corporate law, let alone criminal law. He was, however, named Biden, and for his Chinese partners, then desperate to find out what American investigators knew about their operations, that was plenty good enough.
Is there anything about such corrupt Chinese dealings that we wouldn’t know — that we wouldn’t be drenched in 24/7 — if Xi had bought the Trumps rather than the Bidens? If Trump had a lawyer son who was hired to snoop around and find out what the American government had on a clandestine agent of China? If, after taking office, Trump — rather than Biden — had shut down the previous administration’s “China initiative,” a three-year counter-espionage effort to root out Chinese spying and intellectual-property theft on American college campuses and in U.S. industries?
More to the point, is anyone really puzzled about why, with Biden in power, Xi’s regime is so confident it can stoke violence in San Francisco with impunity; operate veritable police stations in American cities to harass, intimidate, and force the repatriation of Chinese dissidents; and exploit foreign-exchange and commerce arrangements in our country as opportunities for espionage, intellectual-property theft, and the peddling of Chinese propaganda?
In the cozy, revolving-door relationship between the media and the Democratic Party, I’ve learned after years of observation that the former is the senior partner. These questions, then, can only be rhetorical.