The net is tightening. House Republicans are acquiring more evidence that connects Hunter Biden’s China business dealings to other members of the Biden family including his father, the current president of the United States. Peter Schweizer first exposed many of the connections and the coincidences all the way back in 2018, and the Government Accountability Institute continues to uncover new details. Peter and co-host Eric Eggers detail the latest revelations on the most recent episode of The Drill Down.
On March 17, the House Oversight Committee released a memorandum detailing bank records that it says show multiple Biden family received payments from an account set up by a John Robinson (Rob) Walker, a Biden family associate, shortly after that account received a $3 million wire transfer from a Chinese company.
Committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY), this weekend told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News, “We’re going to follow the money. We knew there was a money trail, we’ve spoken to enough people that were involved in the shady business games all around the world.” Comer added, “Everything that we’ve subpoenaed thus far was accurate from what our whistleblowers were telling us, and we have a whole lot more information. This was the first deal, and we have many more to come.”
GAI has been on top of the Hunter Biden story since 2018. Its research team is still uncovering new details. The discovery of Hunter Biden’s discarded laptop has yielded a trove of information to journalists and congressional investigators of how the Biden family profited from deals with Chinese companies directly tied to the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese intelligence. For GAI, it confirmed what Peter had revealed in chapters 2 and 3 of his 2018 book Secret Empires and his follow-up books, Profiles in Corruption (2020) and Red Handed (2022), each of which had sections detailing new findings about this subject.
Peter starts by asking Eric about the new disclosures about the Biden family’s enterprise.
“Well, that word ‘enterprise’ is doing a lot of work there. Some would say ‘scheme.’” Eric quips. But he adds that the information collected by the Oversight committee has confirmed the financial records of the pass-thru transfers from these connected Chinese accounts.
Peter explains how the Biden family has changed its story since 2018. First, in 2018, they said there were no deals. Then in 2020, when more evidence surfaced and the issue was raised during a presidential debate, they said that there were deals, but they received no money from China.
Cut to this weekend, and Eric reads the latest revelation from Hunter Biden ‘s attorneys’ response to Comer’s questions, that Hunter “received his portion of good-faith seed funds, which he shared with his uncle James Biden and with Hallie Biden, with whom he was involved at the time and sharing expenses.”
Peter is not impressed. “The ‘good faith seed money’ to me is bogus if you’re doling it out to family members,” he said. “Seed money is supposed to be to get a business up and running, to rent office space, that kind of thing… But at least they are now acknowledging they have had and profited from these deals.”
In many ways, the Bidens took a page from Bill and Hillary Clinton, who used the Clinton Foundation as a slush fund to underwrite their personal lifestyles. But where the exorbitant payments to Bill Clinton for making speeches was more open, the pattern set by the Bidens is to deliberately seek to obscure the role of Joe Biden in the family business. One of the arrangements revealed from email exchanges recovered from the laptop, for example, discusses Hunter getting an extra stake of a business proposal from the Chinese energy company CEFC reserved as “10% for the big guy.”
Peter says they took those steps to obscure it because “they knew CEFC was sketchy.”
Another example is an arrangement for that looks legitimate but where Hunter and other family members fronted the deal to obscure Joe Biden’s role.
There are emails related to the establishment of two different “Biden Centers” at the U. of Delaware and U. of Penn that discuss the new center’s budget. In August of 2016, as Joe is winding up his term as vice president, family advisor Eric Schwerin emails the family to confirm the center’s budget at $2.5MM a year for five years. Schwerin writes that “we need to start thinking about what to do programmatically because the entire $2.5 million can’t be spent on salaries.”
GAI continues to follow this emerging story.
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