Given the grave threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), especially near an election and in an era in which fears of foreign influence are at an all-time high, one might think revelations about the family of Democratic nominee Joe Biden cashing in on Communist China while he was vice president might be a “big [expletive] deal,” in the cellar-dwelling candidate’s words.
Yet the media and political class have completely blacked out these newly released facts. This was on display during the first presidential debate when Biden and moderator Chris Wallace called a “lid” on it.
Biden Family Secrets Exposed
The joint Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Finance Committee report on Hunter Biden’s business dealings with foreign powers, and their relation to U.S. government policy during the Obama-Biden administration, states the following:
Hunter Biden has extensive connections to Chinese businesses and Chinese foreign nationals that are linked to the Communist government. Those contacts bore financial fruit when his father was vice president and after he left office.
These ties went beyond the former vice president’s son. The report adds: “The records acquired by the Committees show consistent, significant and extensive financial connections among and between Hunter Biden, James Biden, Sara Biden … and Chinese nationals connected to the Communist regime and PLA as well as other foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds.”
The joint investigation details a stunning array of transactions that “paint a mosaic of the complex corporate structure that existed between entities linked to Hunter Biden, his associates, and his family and Chinese companies linked to the Communist government.” Many of the transactions were flagged for “potential financial criminal activity.” Such activity enriched Hunter Biden to the tune of millions of dollars.
As vice president of the United States, Joe Biden had an absolute obligation to know what his family members were up to, disclose it, and end it. This is not just because of the potential for corruption, but the myriad ways his family’s acts could imperil American national security. Indeed, as the report concludes, the dealings between the Biden family and China don’t merely “raise conflicts of interest concerns, they raise criminal financial, counterintelligence and extortion concerns.”
A Free Pass from Democrats and the Media
The unseemly reality of Hunter Biden enriching himself through positions for which he appears to lack any qualification other than his family name is the least of the issues here. Far more significant is that the loved ones of a high-ranking politician had deep financial interests with foreign adversaries, presenting a nightmare scenario in terms of the potential for exploitation.
If Joe Biden were seeking a security clearance, most everything in the Senate committee report and more would have to be reported. Presumably, these disclosures would imperil his odds of receiving one.
Since he is a candidate, it is up to the American people to do this vetting. This is why it was particularly troublesome that during the first presidential debate, he got a free pass on these issues. Twice, Hunter Biden’s connections with adversarial powers came up. The first time, the former vice president ignored President Donald Trump’s assertion about the unique investment opportunities Hunter exploited, seemingly based on his father’s dealings with Beijing.
The second time, the exchange went like this:
Trump: Once you became vice president he made a fortune in Ukraine, in China, in Moscow, and various other places.
Biden: That is not true.
Trump: He made a fortune, and he didn’t have a job. … Why was he given tens of millions of dollars?
Biden: He wasn’t given tens of millions of dollars. [crosstalk] It was all discredited.
Wallace: We’ve already been through this. I think the American people would rather hear about more substantial subjects. Well, as the moderator, sir, I’m going to make a judgment call here.
Trump: I know, but when somebody gets three and a half million dollars from the mayor of Moscow.
Biden: That is not true. That report is totally discredited.
Trump: Why did he get it?
Biden: Mitt Romney on that committee said it wasn’t worth taxpayers’ money. That report was written for political reasons.
Wallace: I’d like to talk about climate change.
Biden: So would I.
Does anything better depict the gap between Washington and real America than this back-and-forth?
Biden’s Record with China
Joe Biden cannot be allowed to shrug this off with a “C’mon man,” as he has in the past with respect to his son’s Ukrainian dalliances and their relation to the Obama-Biden administration’s Ukraine policy, the troubling centerpiece of the joint Senate committee report.
He has to be straight with the American people about what he knew about his family’s China business, when he knew it, what he did about it, and how it might have affected his duties and responsibilities. This is all especially important since Biden was the man in charge of the Obama administration’s China portfolio. If Biden truly was in the dark regarding these links, that is disturbing. If he knowingly concealed them, all the more so.
Over the course of his time in Washington, Biden has helped guide American foreign policy at the highest levels, first as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and then as vice president. What accentuates the disturbing nature of these revelations about his family is the fact that throughout his career, Biden cheered China’s rise.
Joe Biden supported granting China permanent normal trade relations and the communist country’s accession to the World Trade Organization. Over and over, he served as an avatar of the political establishment’s integrationist and accommodationist approach to China, helping turn it into a global superpower. All along, he claimed this was good for America, even saying it wouldn’t threaten the livelihoods of American workers.
Biden helped make Communist China strong — again, while his family directly profited from it when he was in office — cultivating a relationship with Xi Jinping. The Obama-Biden administration was remarkably soft on China over its most grievous provocations, whether in terms of the catastrophic Office of Personnel Management hack, the militarization of the South China Sea, or its flouting of U.S. capital market regulations with impunity, gaining the imprimatur of the administration after lobbying Biden to ink a memorandum of understanding effectively normalizing its cheating.
Where Are the Russia Collusion-Mongers?
Meanwhile, even today, with Biden forced to toughen his rhetoric about China for the first time in his life — largely thanks to an opponent in Trump, who has engaged in an unprecedented effort to comprehensively confront the Chinese Communist Party — Biden still can only manage to call China a “serious competitor.” He dubs Russia, by contrast, an “opponent.” This is laughable given how much bigger, stronger, richer, and more dangerous is the former.
This raises another question: Where are the Russiagate collusion-mongers on Biden and China? Leave aside that the joint Senate report asserts that Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire from the wife of Moscow’s former mayor, who had allegedly received illegal construction contracts from her husband. Also ignore for a moment that Hunter allegedly sent thousands of dollars to Ukrainian and Russian citizens involved in the sex industry, some transactions of which might have been associated with an “Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring.” Why are the collusion-mongers silent about China?
By their silence and inaction, the collusion-mongers tell us they never actually cared about foreign influence, or at very best only cared about it as a political weapon. It was never about the merits. It was always about power. Part of that power concerned maintaining the China status quo from which the political establishment had so richly profited, and which the Trump administration has since upended.
We now know the extent to which the Biden family was a beneficiary of that China status quo. So once again, we must ask: What did Joe Biden know, and when did he know it?
