By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, April 05, 2022
The walls evidently aren’t closing in on President
Joe Biden.
Despite the mainstream press finally taking up the sleazy
business dealings discussed in emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop,
the media’s lack of interest in the president’s knowledge or involvement in
this lucrative part of the family business is palpable.
If President Donald Trump were caught up in similar
circumstances, he’d be hounded at every press conference and during every walk
to Marine One with the question of what he knew and when he knew it. It’d
dominate cable news and the Sunday shows, newspaper editorials and op-ed pages.
While it’s nice that the laptop, once dismissed as
Russian disinformation, is now finally considered a legitimate source of
news by what are supposed to be news outlets, the reporting comes a year
and half late and doesn’t add new information commensurate with the delay.
At this rate, the press will develop a keen interest in
the Joe Biden angle to the story — the most newsworthy and consequential angle
— sometime in late 2023.
The president’s son, Hunter, and the president’s brother
Jim have made a living from trafficking on their family name and political
connections. The laptop is a guide to a particularly ripe example, a deal with
CEFC China Energy, a cat’s-paw of the Communist Party of China, that funneled
nearly $5 million to Hunter and his uncle.
The president has said that he’s “never spoken” to Hunter
about “his overseas business dealings.” Let’s stipulate that’s true. It still
wouldn’t have taken much conversation for the then-vice president to understand
why his son was hitching a ride on Air Force Two with him on a trip to China in
2013. It wasn’t for sightseeing.
Hunter met with banker Jonathan Li, whose private-equity
fund got approved by Chinese authorities shortly afterward. Hunter sat on the
board.
Until they had a falling out over Hunter’s joining the
board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, Biden’s son was in business with
John Kerry’s stepson, Chris Heinz. So, that’s two relations of Democrats who
had run for president and occupied high government office coincidentally doing
buckraking together.
How could Joe Biden and John Kerry, these sophisticated
statesmen, not notice what was going on? Had they never encountered the
phenomenon of relatives of government officials cashing in on proximity to
power before?
Even if Joe Biden wanted to avert his gaze from Hunter,
in the grip of a terrible addiction, what about his brother, Jim? Did Joe never
talk to him about business either?
Even though we knew about it back in 2020, the CEFC deal
remains jaw dropping. The company sought to extend Chinese influence as part of
Beijing’s “Belt and Road” initiative. The founder of CEFC, Ye Jianming, roped
in Hunter Biden, infamously giving him a 2.8-carat diamond after their first
meeting. Everyone knew the score.
Hunter referred to another CEFC official as “the f***ing
spy chief” and was under no illusions about his own value to the firm. He told
Tony Bobulinski, recruited to structure the deal, that CEFC was “coming to be
MY partner to be partners with the Bidens.”
The only one who didn’t understand the nature of this
relationship was Joe Biden, who must have believed well-heeled Chinese
companies sought out his son for his business acumen and sound judgment.
A notorious e-mail says that “the big guy,” identified by
Bobulinksi as Joe Biden, was going to get a 10 percent cut of the deal. In a
text, Hunter’s associate James Gilliar reminded Bobulinksi, “Don’t mention Joe
being involved, it’s only when u are face to face.”
If Republicans take the House, they should make all of
this a major focus of investigation. In the meantime, the press ought — out of
shame, if nothing else — to bring more skepticism to assurances that Joe Biden
knew nothing. Even the president’s fiercest critics don’t believe that
he’s that clueless.
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