On May 21, 2014, then–Vice President Joe Biden, in his role as Obama administration point-man for American policy with respect to several countries, including Romania, delivered a speech in Bucharest, admonishing the prime minister and other Romanian officials that “corruption is a cancer.” He warned that allowing public corruption to fester “can represent a clear and present danger not only to a nation’s economy, but to its very national security.”
Investigations currently being pressed by House Republicans raise worrisome indications that Biden may have failed to heed his own advice.
That is the upshot of a 36-page interim report issued by the House Oversight Committee led by Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.). Thanks to Biden administration stonewalling, the committee’s probe is still at an early stage. In the president’s first two years, for example, Treasury Department practices were altered to deny the GOP minority access to over 150 Suspicious Activity Reports filed by banks in connection with Biden family transactions. Until Republicans took control of the House and its subpoena power in January, House GOP efforts stalled, with investigators left to rely on the yeoman’s work of Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), relying on information derived from Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop and whistleblowers.
Still, as the interim report details, after a perusal of just a fraction of the relevant data, his family members and their associates have hauled in over $10 million from foreign nationals and their related companies since Biden’s days as Obama administration vice president. These include Gabriel Popoviciu, a businessman convicted of bribery in Romania and relatedly investigated by British authorities. He poured over $1 million into Biden family accounts even as the then–vice president lectured Bucharest about corruption.
The Romanian payments to the Bidens fit a disturbing pattern replicated in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere. The source of the funds was a corrupt foreigner, in some cases likely a tool of a foreign state. Vast sums of money were first transferred from a company controlled by the source to a corporate shell controlled by a Biden crony, such as James Gilliar or, in the Romanian transactions, Robinson Walker. Over time, and after taking a cut, the crony would transfer funds to accounts controlled by Biden family members.
Often, those family members were the now-president’s famously erratic son Hunter and Joe’s brother, Jim, a consultant-of-all-trades. House investigators have identified as many as nine Bidens on the receiving end of money transfers, including minor children and such figures as Hallie Biden (a school counselor, who is the widow of the president’s late son Beau and was later the paramour of Hunter), who can have performed no conceivable services in exchange for these payments. Given the pattern of how public corruption works around the globe, the people making the payments must have expected that they were investing in official favor.
That is the most alarming fact in the pattern. It is easy to see large sums of foreign-source money coming the Bidens’ way. The bank records don’t lie. What’s not apparent is any legitimate value received in exchange. There are no obvious assets, commodities, or services as one would expect to find when legitimate transfers of exorbitant sums are exchanged in business transactions. The only apparent item of value is potential access to Joe Biden and his influence over American policy.
As a result, the payments resemble what investigators frequently find in examining criminal enterprises: conspirators forever grappling with the challenge of concealing where the money is coming from, how much of it there is, and who is getting it. By receiving big foreign payments — such as millions from Popoviciu and entities closely connected to the Xi regime and the Chinese Communist Party — the Biden cronies conceal the source from view. Meantime, the Biden family used at least 20 corporate shells — mainly limited liability companies (LLCs), 15 of which Hunter Biden set up while his father was vice president. These entities establish bank accounts. With the use of numerous accounts, the big payments are divided and staggered into smaller, less conspicuous transfers doled out over time. The labyrinthine structure and payout complexities — the kind you don’t tend to see in even big-dollar transactions that are on the up and up — raise colorable suspicion of money laundering.
Of course, whether criminal laws have been violated is a second-order issue. As then–Vice President Biden told the Romanians, public corruption can become a profound national-security problem. The question is what shady foreigners and corrupt regimes, some of them hostile to the United States, believe they were buying.
It has long been known that the Biden family did its most lucrative wheeler-dealing with China. In just the year between 2017 and 2018, the Bidens received $6 million from CEFC, a Chinese conglomerate — or, better, an agent of China dressed up as a conglomerate. Again, there was no apparent exchange of value other than potential access to Joe Biden — unless you count the $1 million paid to Hunter to serve as a defense lawyer (not his area of legal practice) to represent Patrick Ho, whom he famously referred to in a laptop recording as the “f***ing spy chief of China.” When the Justice Department prosecuted and convicted Ho for foreign corruption, it disclosed that there had been relevant national-security surveillance under FISA. Not long after that, China apprehended Hunter’s main CEFC partner, Ye Jianming, formerly a globally renowned tycoon and Xi protégé but one who has not been seen publicly since.
CEFC bore all the classic earmarks of a Chinese influence operation.
Predictably, the media–Democratic complex is doing its best to bury the House Republican findings. They deserve more attention and further investigation.