How a Recent Joe Biden Pledge Just Put Him Back in Front of the Ethics Crosshairs
Source: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
This isn’t news. We all knew that Joe Biden was ethically compromised with his involvement in Hunter Biden’s alleged government access deals. Joe appears to have gone rogue by getting the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor looking into Burisma, an energy company, on corruption charges by threatening to withhold aid. At the time, Hunter was on the board of the company making $50k/month by reportedly selling access to then-top Obama officials to shield the company from legal issues. It worked. Hunter got this gig in 2014. Daddy Biden was tasked with helming US policy aims in the country, specifically on efforts to root out corruption. Yeah, you can’t make this up.
Oh, and you, the reader, probably have more experience in the energy sector than Hunter. There was also a deal hashed out with CEFC China Energy that fell through in 2017, but the Bidens got paid millions for their time. This scheme was launched while Joe was still vice president. He was involved. He did know what his son was doing despite saying otherwise on the 2020 campaign trail. Joe lied. He also met with executives from Burisma. All of this was exposed thanks to Hunter Biden not picking up a laptop he dropped off for repairs in 2019. The New York Post reported on it. It was the 2020 October surprise, and the media suffocated it with a pillow. Now, all of this ethical sludge is being spewed up again because Joe Biden pledged that family members would have no influence on government affairs. Yeah, that leads us to his son-in-law, Howard Krein, whose health care ventures could land Joe in some ethical hot water. This isn’t the first time either (via NY Post):
Yosi Health CEO Hari Prasad created software that would help make the vaccine process more efficient and sought help from one of his company’s first investors, StartUp Health, which employs Biden son-in-law, Howard Krein, as its chief medical officer, ABC News reported.
Prasad sought help from StartUp Health in December to pitch their software platform to government health officials, the report said.
”Our goal with StartUp Health is to leverage their relationships and work with state and federal agencies,” he told ABC News.
[…]
“Howard Krein is playing with fire,” Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a nonpartisan ethics watchdog group, told ABC News. “If he gets too close to that flame — if he is trying to either cash in on his relationship with the president, or he is trying to influence policy — the flame is going to get him. And it is not worth it to him or to Biden.”
In an interview earlier this month, the president vowed that family members will not be involved in foreign policy or government matters.
[…]
Krein, a noted surgeon from Philadelphia who married Biden’s daughter Ashley in 2012, oversees StartUp Health’s investments in hundreds of companies.
The president has been a supporter of the business Krein started with his brother Steven Krein and tech entrepreneur Unity Stoakes, appearing at corporate conferences and inviting the company’s executives to the White House to meet former President Barack Obama.
Krein also began advising his father-in-law during the campaign in the spring, playing an unofficial role in developing pandemic response plans.
The relationship drew scrutiny at the time because StartUp Health was trying to invest in companies working on products to be used in responding to the coronavirus.
With Biden now in the White House, the questions are getting renewed attention amid the potential for ethical blunders.
The StartUp Health ties with the Biden apparatus were reported by Politico last October. I mean, talk about an arrangement. You get to oversee a horde of medically based investments, some of which relate to COVID, while advising your father-in-law, who is now president of the United States, on a plan to fight this virus. The same father-in-law says such an issue is on a wartime footing regarding severity. I don’t disagree, but the course of this story striking avarice and corruption also seems quite high.
· The source told the San Francisco Chronicle that the driver passed information to Chinese officials based at the local Chinese Consulate. Part of the staffer’s role was acting as a liaison between Feinstein’s San Francisco office and the local consulate.
· The staffer was recruited to spy after visiting China.
· The staffer, who has not been named, worked for Feinstein for 20 years.
·
Senator Feinstein was alerted to the spy about five years ago. The FBI alerted Feinstein after investigating and finding the staffer shared nothing of substance.
· “They interviewed him, and Dianne forced him to retire, and that was the end of it,” the source said. “None of her staff ever knew what was going on. They just kept it quiet.”
· Feinstein wouldn’t comment on the spy but her office told CBS that none of the staffers in San Francisco have ever had security clearances.
· Noting the oddness of the discovery, President Donald Trump said via Twitter on August 3: “Dianne is the person leading our Nation on ‘Collusion’ with Russia (only done by Dems). Will she now investigate herself?”
· …Dianne is the person leading our Nation on “Collusion” with Russia (only done by Dems). Will she now investigate herself? https://t.co/OG6l04bBwg
· — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 4, 2018
· Feinstein’s Relationship With China
· Some details of Feinstein’s past are now being examined anew, centered on her close relationship with China, beginning with her service as mayor of San Francisco from 1978 to 1988.
· Feinstein has long been linked to China. For instance, she hosted former president of China Jiang Zemin at her home for dinner when she was mayor of San Francisco, and celebrated the resumption of air service from China to the United States (starting with San Francisco International Airport) after a 32-year hiatus.
· San Francisco and Shanghai have been sister cities for 38 years, after the agreement was put into place by Feinstein and Jiang, who was then Shanghai’s mayor. Feinstein was cited as having a “close relationship” with Jiang and ties between the two continued for many years later.
· Jiang is infamous for cracking down on human rights, most notoriously by banning the peaceful meditation practice of Falun Gong and throwing many of its estimated 100 million adherents into jail.
· 
A re-enactment of organ harvesting in China on Falun Gong practitioners, during a rally in Ottawa, Canada, 2008. (The Epoch Times)
· Under Jiang, torture, rape, murder, and even organ harvesting from detained practitioners became common.
· To help facilitate the relationship between the U.S. and China, Feinstein asked organizers of the city’s popular Chinese New Year Parade to stop displaying the flag of the Nationalist Chinese government, which ruled in exile in Taiwan after 1949.
· Feinstein also defended China, despite its communist policies, insisting that it was merely “socialist.”
· “There was originally this kind of anti-communist view of China,” Feinstein told the Washington Post. “That’s changing. . . . China is a socialist country but one that is increasingly becoming capitalistic.”
· Husband Becomes Prominent Investor in China
· Several articles from the 90s explore the development of not only Feinstein’s developing relationship with China while she was mayor, but her husband’s burgeoning investments there.
· According to the Los Angeles Times, in 1997 Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum, who invests his own and clients’ money into undervalued firms, expanded his business investments into the communist nation to the point that “his firm is now a prominent investor” there.
· In 1992, the investments amounted to one project worth less than $500,000. Two years later he was planning to invest up to $150 million and two years after that a Blum investment firm paid $23 million for a stake in a Chinese government-owned steel company.
· Another investment by Blum’s firm was helped by the International Finance Corp., an arm of the World Bank, which invested $10 million in the leading producers of soybean milk and candy in China.
· Utterly amazing to read this 1997 report on Sen Feinstein’s family’s political and business ties to #China in context of revelations about a Chinese spy working for her as a driver for 20 years, quietly let go seemingly rather than being brought to justice https://t.co/efwT2yZgkg pic.twitter.com/twAI5igZ2I
· — Benjamin Weingarten (@bhweingarten) August 4, 2018
· “It seems to be going quite well,” Rashad Kaldan—who in 1994 managed the IFC’s capital markets investments in Asia—told the Times of the project. He added: “There also was some comfort in that Mr. Blum had some contacts with the Chinese.”
· Blum said that his interest in China went back many years, predating political connections. He won permission from the Chinese in 1981 to climb the east face of Mt. Everest and called himself a close friend of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader who the Chinese government opposes.
· In dispatches written for the San Francisco Examiner, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Blum said that a goodwill visit to China by Feinstein in 1979 helped him win permission to climb Everest.
· “We had come to build goodwill, promote trade and to make new friends,” Blum wrote in one story, adding, “but I asked for and received permission to have another kind of meeting—one with the Chinese Mountaineering Association.”
· Trips to China
· Feinstein took three trips between 1995 and 1997 to China, in addition to trips earlier in her mayoral service, to meet with top communist officials, including Jiang. Blum often attended the meetings with her, an arrangement the Times described as “unusual.”
· At one time, the couple had dinner at Zhongnanhai, the enclave reserved for the president and other top officials in China.
· “We had dinner in Zhongnanhai in Mao Tse-tung’s old residence in the room where he died. We were told that we were the first foreigners to see his bedroom and the swimming pool. It was a very historic moment to see some of these things,” told the Los Angeles Times. Mao was the communist leader of China whose policies led to the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese people.
· Feinstein insisted that Blum had never spoken to officials during meetings about business.
· “I am open to any suggestion as to how I can even make a firewall more fireproof,” she said. “I don’t know what else I can do. . . . Either he retires or I suppose we end our marriage.”
Joe Biden Calls Chinese Communist Party Leader Xi Jinping
President Joe Biden called the Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping Wednesday, on the occasion of the Lunar New Year, according to the White House.
Presidential staff provided a readout of the call, asserting Biden expressed “fundamental concern” about China’s “coercive and unfair economic practices” and also spoke about the governments’ crackdown in Taiwan and human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
President Xi pushed back on Biden’s rhetoric, according to China’s state-run propaganda outlet the Global Times, reminding him the United States should “respect” China’s actions in domestic affairs.
Biden also spoke about his priorities with Xi, according to the White House, on “countering the COVID-19 pandemic, and the shared challenges of global health security, climate change, and preventing weapons proliferation.”
The White House said Biden remained committed to working with China as long as it served American interests.
“President Biden committed to pursuing practical, results-oriented engagements when it advances the interests of the American people and those of our allies,” the readout concluded.
The Global Times noted Biden also “conveyed festive greetings to the Chinese people and wished the Chinese people a happy and prosperous New Year.”
Biden and Xi have a longstanding relationship that began during former President Barack Obama’s administration when Biden was the vice president.
“I know him pretty well,” Biden said in an interview with CBS on Sunday. “He’s very bright and he’s very tough and – I don’t mean it as a criticism it’s just a reality – he doesn’t have a democratic…bone in his body.”
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