A $1.5 billion sweetheart deal Hunter Biden’s private equity firm secured from the state-owned Bank of China is “looming on the horizon” as a potential line of attack against his father’s 2020 presidential campaign, according to Vanity Fair’s Tina Nguyen.
This comes days after a New York Times article renewed interest in the revelations exposed in Peter Schweizer’s 2018 bestseller Secret Empires concerning the sweetheart deals Hunter Biden’s private equity firm secured while his father, Joe Biden, was vice president.
But the Times’ article “may be just the first volley in what is likely to become a broader war over Joe Biden’s conduct and record,” Vanity Fair’s Nguyen writes:
Past speculation about Biden family drama has centered on Hunter’s documented struggle with drug use and his recently ended relationship with his late brother’s widow. But the bigger threat might actually be Hunter’s past business enterprises. Already, there’s another attack line looming on the horizon: in his latest book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Breitbart editor-at-large Peter Schweizer describes how a private-equity firm managed by Hunter Biden, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, negotiated a $1.5 billion investment deal with the state-owned Bank of China at the same time that his father, then the vice president, was conducting high-level diplomacy with Beijing. (On one of his trips, Hunter allegedly made use of Air Force Two.) Whether or not the Chinese hoped to curry favor with Hunter’s father, Trump allies are sure to make note of the issue, especially given Joe Biden’s controversial remark this week downplaying China as an economic competitor. (A spokesman for Hunter Biden disputed Schweizer’s claims to the Journal.)
In a March interview with Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham, Peter Schweizer explained the troubling circumstances surrounding Hunter Biden’s lucrative deal with the Chinese government at a time when his father was negotiating U.S. policy with the regime.
“In December of 2013, Hunter Biden flies on Air Force 2 to Beijing, China, with his father,” Schweizer said. “His father meets with Chinese officials, he’s very soft on Beijing. The most important thing that happens [is] 10 days after they return. And that’s when Hunter Biden’s small, private equity firm called Rosemont Seneca Partners gets a $1 billion private equity deal with the Chinese government, not with the Chinese corporation, with the government. And what people need to realize is Hunter Biden has no background in China. He has no background in private equity. The deal he got in the Shanghai free-trade zone, nobody else had — Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Blackstone, nobody had this deal.”
“There’s no question when you chart what Joe Biden is doing with China — the meetings he’s having and the deals that his son is procuring at the same time — that they are buying off Biden through his son. I think it’s crystal clear,” Schweizer added.
In an interview last year with SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight, Schweizer explained China’s foreign influence peddling tactic.
“The Chinese government has figured out that the way to get favorable treatment from policymakers in Washington, DC, is by, basically, signing sweetheart deals with the children of politicians because they think by doing so, they’ll get better policy positions from our government,” Schweizer said. “And the history indicates in the Obama administration that that’s exactly what happens.”
He noted that Joe Biden’s 2013 trip to Beijing came at a crucial moment for U.S.-China relations when the communist regime’s behavior was increasingly and openly menacing to U.S. allies in the region, a fact which made the former vice president’s decision to go “soft on China” all the more remarkable.
“To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea,” Schweizer said. “They basically have said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese approval. We are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely criticized on that trip for going soft on China. So basically, no challenging them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.”
On Tuesday, a New York Times article by Kenneth Vogel and Iuliia Mendel described Hunter Biden’s lucrative dealings with a Ukrainian oligarch-owned energy company at a time when his father was mediating U.S. policy towards Ukraine. According to the Times, the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings paid Hunter Biden “as much as $50,000 per month in some months” for his work as a board member, despite the fact that he “lacked any experience in Ukraine and just months earlier had been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine.”
A Ukrainian corruption probe into Burisma Holdings was scuttled in 2016, when Vice President Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to the country if the Ukrainian government did not fire the prosecutor who launched the corruption investigation. Withholding the loans would have thrown the former Soviet republic into insolvency at a time when it was fending off attacks from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Schweizer, the president of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute and a senior contributor-at-large for Breitbart News, wrote the bestselling 2015 exposé Clinton Cash, which is widely credited for its instrumental impact on Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign due to Schweizer’s copious documentation of the former secretary of state’s history of amassing wealth from donors seeking favorable actions from her State Department.
Schweizer’s research on Hunter Biden has already triggered Democrat strategists worried that Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign could suffer the same fate as Clinton’s. The similarities between the two candidates are hard to dismiss: both are Democrat establishment favorites, both are Obama administration alums, and both are tainted by accusations that they used their authority as government officials to benefit their family to the potential detriment of U.S. foreign policy.
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