An expose of Hunter Biden’s emails published by The Post on Wednesday showed the oft-troubled son leveraging access to his then-vice president father and introducing him to an executive of a Ukrainian gas company that was under scrutiny at the time.
The family’s dealings in Ukraine are the subject of several congressional probes and even led to the impeachment of President Trump who was eventually cleared in the Senate of the charge that he pressured Ukraine’s leader to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.
Hunter Biden’s dealings in China, however, have earned a lot less scrutiny — including over a $1 billion windfall for his business venture just days after visiting Beijing with his influential father.
In 2009, Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of former secretary of state John Kerry, founded Rosemont Seneca Partners, a billion-dollar private equity firm.
Still at the helm of the firm, Hunter flew aboard Air Force Two to China in December 2013, accompanying his then-veep father on an official visit where Joe Biden reportedly met with Hunter’s Chinese partners.
Ten days later, Hunter’s company inked a deal with the state-owned Bank of China and created the $1 billion investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), according to reporting by Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and the best-selling author of “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.”
A representative for BHR told The New Yorker in July 2019 that Hunter Biden introduced his father to Chinese private equity executive Jonathan Li during the trip. Li later became the CEO of BHR.
Hunter Biden was forced to step down from the BHR board in October 2019 following blistering call outs from President Trump.
A spokesman for Biden’s family denied any wrongdoing or that there was a connection between the vice president’s visit and BHR’s wild fundraising success.
However, Schweizer found what he described as “a troubling pattern” of Biden and Heinz both seeming to benefit from their fathers’ positions in the Obama administration.
“Over the next seven years, as both Joe Biden and John Kerry negotiated sensitive and high-stakes deals with foreign governments, Rosemont entities secured a series of exclusive deals often with those same foreign governments,” Schweizer wrote in his book.
In another May 2017 incident, Hunter met with Chinese tycoon Ye Jianming, the chairman of energy company CEFC, in a Miami hotel room and the pair discussed American infrastructure and energy deals, according to a 2018 report by the New York Times.
After the meeting, Ye sent Hunter a 2.8-carat diamond and a “thank you” note and the ex-veep’s son began negotiating a deal for CEFC to invest $40 million dollars in a natural gas project on Louisiana’s Monkey Island.
Six months later, a CEFC executive was arrested in New York on unrelated bribery charges, and his first call was to Hunter Biden’s uncle, James Biden. According to the Times report, James believed the call was for Hunter.
“There is nothing else I have to say,” James Biden told the publication. “I don’t want to be dragged into this anymore.”
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