Chinese Partners Financed Bidens’ Spending Spree While Bidens Sought Visa Help for Them

O n the same day their China-regime-connected partners transferred $99,000 for a Biden family spending spree, the Biden family pressed a former Obama administration official to help their Chinese partners obtain U.S. visas.

The Justice Department is investigating the mutual back-scratching and its context. Indications are that what is commonly referred to as the Justice Department’s “Hunter Biden tax investigation” — now that such references are no longer taboo — is about more than potential tax violations and, for that matter, more than Hunter Biden.

President Biden’s brother and sister-in-law, Jim and Sara Biden, were also deeply involved in the family’s lucrative relationship with CEFC — a now-defunct conglomerate headed by a one-time protégé of Xi Jinping, the now-“disappeared” Ye Jianming. Moreover, Joe Biden himself is implicated by evidence that he may have been a 10 percent stakeholder. Catherine Herridge of CBS News reports that the grand jury investigating Hunter Biden has also sought records of Jim Biden’s financial transactions with CEFC and its affiliates.

That development is alluded to in significant new reporting by the Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross. Based on a review of emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, Ross relates that on September 12, 2017, Jim Biden’s wife, Sara, reached out to John Sandweg, formerly the Obama administration’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for help obtaining visas for Ye and his family. Sara Biden’s contact with Sandweg was done at the bidding of Gongwen (“Kevin”) Dong, who handled CEFC’s American operations.

On the same day that Sara contacted Sandweg on Ye’s behalf, Dong authorized a $99,000 line of credit on which Hunter, Jim, and Sara Biden drew for a shopping spree, purchasing various luxury items.

The genesis of the credit line and the Biden family’s drawing on it are described in a September 23, 2020, investigative report (pp. 76–78) by Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.). To establish the credit line, Dong used an entity called Hudson West III LLC. As Senators Grassley and Johnson explain, Hudson West III appears to have been incorporated as a U.S.-based CEFC subsidiary in 2016 but was later owned jointly by Hunter Biden (through his law firm, Owasco PC) and Dong (through an entity called Coldharbour Capital LLC, headquartered at Dong’s address).

Clearly, one thing the grand jury must be wondering is why, if the Biden–CEFC business dealings were on the up-and-up, participants thought it necessary to transfer lavish payments through a labyrinthian maze of companies and nominees.

Chuck Ross’s report elaborates that, upon Sara Biden’s request for visa assistance to Ye (with Hunter and Jim Biden copied on the relevant emails), the former Obama official, Sandweg, “offered up several options for the immigration case. Dong picked an option that would allow for visas for Ye, his wife, and his children through a loophole that provides temporary visas to executives for the American subsidiaries of foreign companies.” A source informed the Free Beacon that, in the end, Sandweg did not file visa applications on Ye’s behalf because CEFC and its subsidiaries “did not provide supporting documents needed for the process.”

CEFC had extensive ties to the Xi regime and the Chinese Communist Party. It was an instrument of the extortionate “debt-trap diplomacy” that the Chinese government calls its Belt and Road Initiative.

As we’ve previously noted, Ye enticed Hunter into the relationship by presenting him with an expensive diamond. They discussed various ways in which the company would enrich the Bidens while the Bidens would provide CEFC officials with access to themselves and their influential network of contacts. The principal transaction appears to have been a proposed $40 million liquefied-natural-gas project on Monkey Island in Louisiana. This was the ultimately unconsummated 2017 deal for which the Bidens recruited Anthony Bobulinski, a former naval officer and successful businessman, to build out the corporate structure.

In addition to numerous meetings with Hunter and Jim Biden, Bobulinski has said he had two face-to-face meetings with Joe Biden — by then the former vice president who was planning his 2020 presidential bid. Documents from the laptop, corroborated by Bobulinski, indicate that Joe Biden had a 10 percent stake in the deal. Implausibly, the president continues to deny not only any involvement in his son’s business ventures but even any discussions with Hunter about those ventures.

As Ross has previously reported, when Hunter arranged joint office space in Washington for the Biden Foundation and CEFC’s American subsidiary, Hudson West, he instructed that keys be made for Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, as well Jim Biden and Gongwen Dong, whom Hunter described as “Chairman Ye CEFC emissary.”

I’ve previously recounted the intriguing payment streams, drawing on the Grassley/Johnson Senate report. In August 2017, a CEFC subsidiary wired $5 million to Hudson West III; over the next year, nearly $4.8 million of these funds were transferred to Owasco — said to be for “consulting.” During the same period, Owasco funneled nearly $1.4 million to Jim Biden, through the bank account held by Jim and Sara Biden, under the auspices of a consulting firm, the Lion Hall Group. Hudson West also sent over $76,000 directly to Jim Biden’s Lion Hall Group during 2018.

And let’s not forget the additional million dollars that Ye paid Hunter to poke around and find out whether and why the Justice Department was investigating CEFC executive Patrick Ho, memorably referred to by Hunter in a laptop recording as the “f***ing spy chief of China.” In fact, Ho was the subject of both a corruption investigation based on bribery of foreign officials and an FBI national-security investigation (under FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) for acting as a clandestine agent of China. In the just-referenced column, I recounted:

On November 2, 2017, CEFC attempted to send Hunter Biden’s firm $1 million through the Hudson West III account. As the Senate report details, CEFC initially explained this payment as a “consultation fee” to Hudson West III for “market investigation of a natural gas project” which was deemed unnecessary, resulting in the refund of the money. However, Hunter Biden later acknowledged that it was a $1 million fee that should have gone to his law firm for the representation of Patrick Ho, but had to be refunded because Hunter provided the wrong wire-transfer instructions. The problem was subsequently corrected, and the payment went through.

Interestingly, when Ho was arrested in November 2017, his first call was to Jim Biden. Jim told the New York Times that he assumed the call was for Hunter, and passed along his nephew’s contact information. Ho was eventually convicted and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. About a week after the Justice Department disclosed that Ho was the subject of FISA surveillance, Ye was detained by Chinese authorities, reportedly on the order of Xi Jinping, and has not been seen since.

Sure seems like there’s a lot more going on here than what Hunter modestly refers to as “my tax affairs.” Didn’t the media used to think collusion with an anti-American foreign power was a pretty big deal?