Why the China concern stands apart in the Biden family’s business dealings
Tom Rogan
President Joe Biden must explain what he knew about his son’s business dealings with Chinese Communist Party-aligned interests, and to what degree he was involved in or benefited from them.
That is a minimum expectation that should follow from the House Oversight Committee’s interim report on Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. Of particular note is the report’s documentation of Hunter Biden’s effort to use his father’s position and influence to earn millions of dollars from a Chinese Communist Party-aligned business.
There are special counterintelligence concerns attached to any Biden family business dealing with China. That’s because, more than any other great power, Beijing effectively leverages business as a continuation of politics by other means. And because it has manifestly hostile intent toward U.S. national interests. This makes concerns about the Bidens stand apart even from other otherwise similar examples of cronyism, as with former President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his engagements with the UAE and Qatar.
The report specifically notes Hunter’s effort to sell U.S. liquid natural gas assets to China’s now-defunct CEFC corporation. This effort secured for Hunter and his U.S. business partners nearly $5 million. Documents show Hunter told Chinese investors involved in one business transaction that his engagement had “nothing to do with me and everything to do with my last name,” adding, “we should be able to achieve a great deal, just give me my marching orders.”
In 2017, after Joe Biden had left office, documents imply Hunter suggested establishing a bank account for his father, “the Big Guy.”
The report also notes Hunter’s contact with what, for all intents and purposes, was a Chinese intelligence agent. JiaQi Bao liaised with other Chinese corporate and Communist Party interests on Hunter’s behalf and later pushed Hunter to persuade his father to run for president.
This reeks of a Chinese effort to compromise the president. As underlined by their cyber operations, the Chinese intelligence services revel in big data-centric compromise actions. In this case, the effort appears designed either to facilitate either passive pressure via fostering Joe Biden’s goodwill toward China in fear of Beijing making embarrassing disclosures absent that goodwill. Or, alternatively, to facilitate an active pressure campaign by enabling Chinese officials to make demands of Biden in return for continuing secrecy on his prior business dealings. It should be noted that Biden’s policy toward China as president has been generally simpatico with that of the Trump administration. Still, this report’s identification of the ingredients for a possible compromise of the sitting president of the United States is, in and of itself, a prima facie concern.
The report carries another China-related concern: “Committee Republicans possess emails that show that Hunter Biden, CEFC officials, and Joe Biden would share offices under the Hudson West/CEFC/Biden Foundation name.”
Now consider two further points.
First, we now know the president improperly stored classified documents at two different addresses (it should be noted that there is little evidence thus far that Biden sought to resist return of those classified documents in a manner similar to former President Donald Trump).
Second, that the Chinese intelligence services view politics and business as symbiotic concerns. This applies at the strategic level toward other nations, as with China’s use of investment to win political submission from France and Germany. But it also applies to Chinese corporate or individual entities.
Any Chinese business with access to the Biden family would have been regarded by Beijing as a critical access point through which to advance its foreign policy interests. Chinese businesses cannot say no to Beijing. If CEFC had access to a building in which documents from Biden’s time as vice president might have been stored, the potential for a covert Chinese technical or human intelligence effort to access those documents would have been significant.
This is not a merely hypothetical concern. China’s two primary intelligence services, the Ministry of State Security and the intelligence arms of the People’s Liberation Army, are exceptionally well-resourced, highly aggressive, and absolutely focused on U.S.-related intelligence activities. The FBI has been overwhelmed by Chinese Communist Party-related investigations, a challenge Beijing exacerbates by flooding the U.S. with intelligence officers and agents of varying capability, threat, and intent. This is why, for example, China is so keen to expand its visa access to the U.S., and why it was utterly idiotic of the Biden administration to suspend the Justice Department’s “China Initiative” counterintelligence program.
Put simply, the president has questions to answer. What did he know about what his son was doing with Chinese entities and when? What financial gains were made for him or secured in holding for his interests? And what steps did he take, if any, to protect the nation from the threat of America’s most capable and aggressive adversary taking advantage of his son’s greed?