Former President Donald Trump slammed President Joe Biden following the revelation that he was stashing classified documents at the University of Pennsylvania, which is reported to have accepted millions of dollars in mysterious donations from China.
Trump speculated that China could have had access to the classified information because the Penn Biden Center reportedly received $54 million in anonymous Chinese donations between 2014 and 2019.
“Biden’s documents are HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL, many pertain to UKRAINE, where Hunter was ‘raking in the dough,’ and FUNDED BY CHINA, which gave $55 Million to Biden, through Penn, and probably had easy access,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Trump’s reference to Hunter Biden is related to Hunter’s former position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. In 2017, Hunter was paid $83,000 per month to be on the board. Hunter was appointed to the board of Burisma in 2014 with no prior experience with the energy sector or Ukraine.
In 2015, Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion from Ukraine if the Ukrainian government did not fire the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma. In 2017, Hunter’s salary was cut in half when Joe Biden left the White House as then-Vice President, having himself visited Ukraine six times in seven years.
Trump also raised the question of whether former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, the wife of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), knew of the anonymous Chinese donations.
“Was the Old Crow’s boss, China loving Coco Chow, involved?” Trump questioned. “Just asking?”
According to the Washington Free Beacon, some of the funds were donated to the Penn Biden Center by Shanghai real estate developer Xu Xeuqing, who reportedly has no connection to the University of Pennsylvania. In 2011, Xu faced corruption allegations in China but was never charged with a crime. An expert on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at the American Foreign Policy Council, Michael Sobolik, told the Beacon that Xu’s non-prosecution indicates he maitains a close relationship to the CCP.
Chao also has deep connections to Chinese businesses. Breitbart News reported in 2019 that Chao and Mitch McConnell have directly benefited from the Chao family shipping business in China. As Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer recounts in his book Secret Empires, Chao’s father — Mitch McConnell’s father-in-law — gave the Washington power couple a “gift” (the term used on McConnell’s financial disclosure forms to report this transaction) of between $5 and $25 million in 2008.
The “gift” had a large impact on the couple’s wealth. According to the New York Post, “In 2004, current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife, current U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, had an average net worth of $3.1 million. Ten years later, that number had increased to somewhere between $9.2 million and $36.5 million.”
As New York magazine noted, “in many of the videos James Chao brags about his daughter’s government work and contacts. In one video he describes talking with Trump on Air Force One. ‘The president spent several minutes with me,’ he said. ‘We were talking about business.’”
In 2021, Chow was flagged by the Transportation Department’s Inspector General for allegedly using her staff and her office to help benefit her family and their business operations.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.