Hunter Biden’s Firms Scored Reportedly Hundreds of Millions from Russians, Chinese, and Kazakhs AFP/Getty Images
KRISTINA WONG
20 Jan 2020 5,644
5:51
Hunter Biden, son of 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden, has come under scrutiny for his business links to Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma while his father was vice president.
Now, a new book by author Peter Schweizer reveals Hunter Biden forged other business deals with individuals and entities tied with the governments of Russia, China, and Kazakhstan, that reportedly scored him hundreds of millions of dollars.
The book, titled Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite. , lays out how Hunter Biden and his business partners, in addition to his numerous Rosemont-branded entities and ventures, was deeply involved with an entity called the Burnham Financial Group.
Hunter and his business partner, Devon Archer, used Burnham to make foreign deals with governments and oligarchs, according to a copy of the book viewed by Breitbart News.
One of those oligarchs included Nurlan Abduov, the associate of another Kazakh oligarch, Kenges Rakishev. Rakishev is the son-in-law of the former vice prime minister of Kazakhstan, Imangali Tasmagambetov. Tasmagamvetov was also formerly the defense minister, and is now the Kazakh ambassador to Russia.
According to the book, an account Hunter regularly received funds from showed money arriving from a firm run by Rakishev in 2014:
A Morgan Stanley investment account from which Hunter regularly received funds shows money arriving from mysterious sources around the world. There is a $142,300 deposit in April 2014 from Kazakh oligarch–controlled Novatus Holdings. Kenges Rakishev, whose father-in-law is the former vice prime minister of Kazakhstan and a close ally of Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, runs the offshore firm.
While Burnham received funds from Kazakh oligarchs, Archer acted as a backchannel between Kazakhstan to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, according to the book. (Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz was a business partner with Biden and Archer in some of their ventures).
In a July 11, 2013, email, Kerry’s chief of staff David Wade wrote to Archer:
Devon: understand you spoke to the Secretary re having him call [Kazakh] Foreign Minister Idrisov today, can you let me know topics Idrisov wants to talk about/any requests he’ll have of the boss, so we can get paper prepared for a call. Hopefully, the situation on the home front will leave him time to do it.
Burnham also had business deals with two mysterious Chinese companies — Kirin Global Enterprses Limited and Harvest Global Investors, according to the book.
Kirin Global Enterprise Limited was an investment vehicle run by Xiangyao (or Yaojun) “Larry” Liu and Guo Jianfeng, according to Schweizer. “Very little is known about Kirin or its two principals, other than the fact that they invest heavily in mainland Chinese real estate,” he writes. Harvest Global Investors was a Chinese investment firm linked to the government in Beijing.
Burnham also had a financial relationship with Russian Oligarch Yelena Baturina, a billionaire with extensive political connections in Moscow and links to Russian organized crime, according to Schweizer. Archer said Baturina invested $200 million into “various investment funds” with which he was involved.
Burnham also got wrapped up in a $60 million fraudulent bond scheme to rip off union pension funds and the poorest Indian tribe in America, the Oglala Sioux, Schweizer writes.
In May 2016, Archer was arrested in New York and charged with “orchestrating a scheme to defraud investors and a Native American tribal entity of tens of millions of dollars.”
Some of the targeted were government employee or labor union organizations that had supported Joe Biden in the past. Biden has long described himself as a “union man.”
Although Hunter Biden was not charged, Schweizer writes, “his fingerprints were all over Burnham.” The legitimacy that his name and political status as the vice president’s son lent to Burnham was brought up repeatedly during the trial, he writes.
That status was used as a means of both recruiting pension money into the scheme and alleviating investors’ concerns, he writes. In an August 2014 email, Jason Galanis, who was convicted in the bond scheme, agreed that Burnham had “value beyond capital” because of their political connections.
Hunter Biden had an office at Burnham’s New York City offices on Fifty-Seventh Street, and during the trial, numerous witnesses came forward describing Hunter’s involvement with the firm, according to the book.
Schweizer writes these deals have long been a pattern with the Biden family, to include Hunter Biden:
With the election of his father as vice president, Hunter Biden launched businesses fused to his father’s power that led him to lucrative deals with a rogue’s gallery of governments and oligarchs around the world. Sometimes he would hitch a prominent ride with his father aboard Air Force Two to visit a country where he was courting business. Other times, the deals would be done more discreetly. Always they involved foreign entities that appeared to be seeking something from his father. Often, the countries in question, including Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan, had highly corrupt political cultures.
In short, Hunter Biden was not cutting business deals in Japan or Great Britain, where disclosure rules and corporate governance might require greater scrutiny. These were deals in the truly dark corners of the world.
Follow Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong on Twitter or on Facebook .
Joe Biden needs to answer these questions and others now without equivocation concerning the Chinese-related business dealings of Hunter Biden’s firm while Joe Biden was vice president. Otherwise, voters will be entitled to assume the worst about what is likely to lie ahead for U.S.-China relations if Hunter's father Joe Biden is elected president.
Joe Biden has offshored US jobs, and his family's racketeering, to China
By Chris Talgo
During Joe Biden's nearly half-century in politics, he has been an outspoken advocate for globalism. Furthermore, over the past few decades, he has become especially fond of championing the rise of America's primary foe, communist China.
Why does this matter? Because Joe Biden is running for the presidency of the United States, and his cozy relationship with communist China should be called into question.
In 2001, when the Chinese Communist Party was lobbying to join the World Trade Organization, then-senator Joe Biden (D-Del.) was an ardent supporter. While in Taiwan that year, pushing for engagement with China, Biden said , "The more they [China] have to lose, the more they are likely to begin to accommodate international norms." How wrong he was.
Biden also encouraged extending Most Favored Nation status to China permanently, which was also granted in 2001.
When asked this past month by Jake Tapper , "Do you think, in retrospect, you were naïve about China?," Biden responded, "No, here is the thing ... we want China to grow."
Wait, what? Joe Biden wants China to grow. Joe Biden wants China to become more powerful. Joe Biden wants China to usurp more American jobs. Yes, he does.
Since China joined the WTO almost 20 years ago, the American manufacturing sector has paid a steep price.
According to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute , "[t]he U.S. has lost 3.7 million jobs since 2001 due to its trade imbalance with China, with most of the damage done to manufacturing."
Despite the economic carnage throughout America's Rust Belt that China's entry into the WTO propelled, Joe Biden still thinks it was a good idea.
As if his support for China's entry into the WTO was not bad enough, Biden took his enthusiasm for China to a whole new level when he became vice president.
As vice president, Joe Biden was a key player in Obama's "Pivot to Asia" strategy. Biden pushed Obama's Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, which would have been the nail in the coffin for America's industrial base. Fortunately, Obama-Biden's TPP was not ratified by the U.S. Senate.
Yet this did not deter Biden from crafting his own deal, between his son Hunter and the Chinese Communist Party.
As journalist Peter Schweizer has documented in great detail, "[t]his isn't just another story about a politician's kid getting rich[.] ... Hunter's new firm started making investment deals that would serve the strategic interests of the Chinese military."
Interestingly, as Schweizer points out, "[h]e [Biden] became much more soft on Beijing when his son started getting very lucrative, exclusive deals courtesy of the Chinese government."
To this day, Hunter Biden is still in business with the Chinese Communist Party.
In 2019, during the early days of his run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden did a wonderful job of reminding Americans how off-base he is when it comes to communist China.
While campaigning in Iowa, Biden said , "China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. I mean, you know, they're not bad folks, folks. But guess what: they're not competition for us."
As if. Sorry Joe — China is America's chief competitor. You would think a man who has spent the past 47 years in the nation's capital would know that.
And last but not least, the topic of the coronavirus.
When U.S. officials learned of the outbreak in Wuhan, President Trump issued a travel ban from China. How did Joe Biden respond to this? He tweeted , "We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump's record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency."
In other words, Biden opposed the Chinese travel ban, which no doubt saved untold American lives, because he was either too concerned with political correctness or perhaps he was reluctant to cause trouble with his son's money men.
Either way, no matter the reason, Joe Biden's instincts concerning China regarding coronavirus, trade policies, and his son's shady business deals have been troublesome, at best.
When it comes to managing U.S.-China relations, one cannot think of a worse candidate for the difficult job, based on his track record and his family's double-dealings, than Joe Biden.
Chris Talgo ( ctalgo@heartland.org ) is an editor at The Heartland Institute.
Senate Report: Biden Family Bought $100K of ‘Extravagant Items’ with China-Linked Credit Cards AP Photo/Nick Wass
JOHN BINDER
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s family members bought more than $100,000 worth of “extravagant items” in 2017 using a line of credit linked to associates of the Chinese communist government.
A bombshell report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Senate Finance Committee details numerous cases in which Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and family members have deep ties to the Chinese communist government, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.
In one instance, the Senate report states that on September 8, 2017, Hunter Biden and Chinese national Gongwen Dong — with ties to the Chinese communist government — opened a bank account to fund a more than $100,000 “global spending spree” for members of the Biden family.
“Hunter Biden and Gongwen Dong, a Chinese national who has reportedly executed transactions for limited liability companies controlled by Ye Jianming, applied to a bank and opened a line of credit under the business name Hudson West III LLC (Hudson West III),” the Senate report states. The report continues:
Hunter Biden, James Biden, and James Biden’s wife, Sara Biden, were all authorized users of credit cards associated with the account. The Bidens subsequently used the credit cards they opened to purchase $101,291.46 worth of extravagant items, including airline tickets and multiple items at Apple Inc. stores, pharmacies, hotels, and restaurants . The cards were collateralized by transferring $99,000 from a Hudson West III account to a separate account, where the funds were held until the cards were closed. The transaction was identified for potential financial criminal activity. [Emphasis added]
According to the Senate report, Hunter Biden held one of the credit cards while James Biden and Sara Biden, Biden’s brother and sister-in-law, held three cards.
(Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Senate Finance Committee)
The Senate report states that Hudson West III LLC was first incorporated on April 19, 2016, more than a year before the China-linked line of credit was opened to fund purchases made by Hunter Biden, James Biden, and Sara Biden.
Hudson West III LLC had a number of business dealings with companies and Chinese nationals linked to the Chinese communist government, the Senate report states:
On Aug. 8, 2017, CEFC Infrastructure Investment wired $5 million to the bank account for Hudson West III . These funds may have originated from a loan issued from the account of a company called Northern International Capital Holdings, a Hong Kong-based investment company identified at one time as a “substantial shareholder” in CEFC International Limited along with Ye. It is unclear whether Hunter Biden was half-owner of Hudson West III at that time. However, starting on Aug. 8, the same day the $5 million was received, and continuing through Sept. 25, 2018, Hudson West III sent frequent payments to Owasco, Hunter Biden’s firm . These payments, which were described as consulting fees, reached $4,790,375.25 in just over a year. [Emphasis added]
The Senate report also accuses Hunter Biden of paying Russian and Eastern European women who are linked to prostitution or a human trafficking ring. Another detail reveals that one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs paid Hunter Biden’s private equity firm $3.5 million in 2014.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
A Biden Ally and J Street Vice Chair’s Company Offers Access to Senior Chinese Officials And what it says about the Democrat Party.
Wed Sep 16, 2020
Daniel Greenfield
8
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
“Meet and build relationships with China’s senior governmental and private sector leaders in your chosen area of business,” the invitation on the site of Empire Global Ventures read. “Join us for elite curated experiences with the people who decide the future of China’s tech sector, craft and enforce its regulations, dominate its industries and chart its path forward.”
The only thing more intriguing than the invitation may be Empire Global Ventures whose CEO is also the Vice Chair of the board of J Street and a prominent Democrat donor and fundraiser.
When Governor Andrew Cuomo split up with his celebrity girlfriend after over a decade of shacking up together, media accounts made sure to mention the role of Alexandra Stanto in introducing the formerly happy couple.
As the CEO of Empire Global Ventures, Stanton has come a long way since then. But the name of her company closely echoes Empire State Development, an arm of the New York State government, where Stanton had served as chief of staff from 2006 through 2008.
Stanton had worked for David Patterson, back when he was in the State Senate. Then Eliot Spitzer, New York's megalomaniacal Attorney General picked Patterson, the black and partly blind Senate Majority Leader, as his running mate, to score with voters.
Patterson was never expected to actually take the governor's office, but then Spitzer imploded, after allegations of prostitution and thuggish behavior, and was forced to step down.
Stanton, who had been Patterson’s deputy campaign manager for policy, and Sam Natapoff, her husband, had scored six figure gigs with Empire State Development, with Sam earning the grand title of, “Senior Advisor to the Governor of New York State for International Commerce.” Today, Sam is the president of Empire Global Ventures and writes editorials attacking President Trump over his work to help Americans resist China’s abusive trade policies.
Stanton and her husband had been pumping sizable amounts of money into Paterson and Cuomo's war chests. Stanton alone had donated $10,000 to both Paterson and Cuomo. But Stanton’s fundraising soon went national with an Obama fundraiser running as much as $20,000 a ticket. And Obama named Stanton a general trustee of the Kennedy Center.
The money has kept on rolling out with Stanton donating thousands to Mayor Bill de Blasio and scoring an $8,000 per month consulting job for City Hall.
By then, Stanton had become the vice chair of J Street: a key anti-Israel lobby group.
Alexandra Stanton has spent the last 12 years serving as Vice Chair of the anti-Israel group originally funded by George Soros and has, in media accounts, been dubbed a “Jewish leader.”
Alexandra is the granddaughter of Hellenic Lines shipping tycoon Pericles Callimanopulos. The Greek tycoon’s funeral service was held at the Greek Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Manhattan.
Pericles' daughter and Alexandra's mother, Domna Stanton, a feminist academic who is a longtime board member of Human Rights Watch and had a prominent role at Planned Parenthood, was named by De Blasio as one of New York City’s human rights commissioners.
Domna and her husband Frank, a successful entrepreneur who had made his mark helping his brother Arthur import the Volkswagen Beetle to America and trying to launch an early VCR, showed up in Tom Wolfe's famously mocking profile of Leonard Bernstein's Black Panther party.
The Stanton family has connections by marriage to socialites from New York to D.C. and Domna’s Hamptons garden parties are required attendance for celebrities and the smart set.
Alexandra Stanton has kept up the tradition with cocktail parties attended by none other than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She was on the host committee for Hillary Clinton’s million dollar fundraiser for Bill de Blasio, and, more recently, she took part in a Joe Biden fundraiser.
When Pelosi spoke at the anti-Israel J Street’s gala, she thanked Stanton by name.
And when Obama descended into ugly antisemitic attacks against Jewish opponents of the Iran Deal, Alexandra Stanton was there to claim that he “has a right to combat what he thinks are campaigns against him laden with non-facts and offensive statements.”
But Alexandra has a lot of irons in the fire besides campaigning against the Jewish State.
These days, Stanton has also been marketing Little Lives PPE face shields for children, scoring a FOX profile, who described the politically connected Democrat, as a "mom". The Wall Street Journal mentioned Stanton's face shields for children in its article on reopening schools alongside a quote from Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers.
The American Federation of Teachers, the country's largest network of Democrat teachers' unions, had its PPE purchases facilitated by Stanton and Empire Global Ventures.
Randi Weingarten, the AFT's head, who recently faced criticism for claiming that it's not safe for teachers to go back to school even while attending Al Sharpton's 50,000 strong rally in D.C., was described as knowing "people at Empire Global Ventures, a business development firm with experience in China, where much of the world’s PPE is manufactured."
This wasn't the only strange intersection between Empire, Democrats, and the coronavirus.
The sister-in-law of Chris Cuomo, a CNN anchor and Governor Cuomo's brother, works for Empire Global Ventures, and has been touting hypochlorous acid from Y2X Life Sciences as an answer to the coronavirus. Cuomo's sister-in-law claimed that spraying hypochlorous acid could keep businesses safe from the virus. Alexandra Stanton and her husband are listed as Y2X Life Sciences advisers, along with Matt Kennedy, RFK’s grandson and Joe Kennedy III’s brother, who sits on the boards of Kennedy institutions, and had held down various positions in the Obama administration, along with Dick Gephardt, the former Democrat House Majority Leader.
In July, a job posting for Empire Global Ventures described it as a medical products company.
What does Empire Global Ventures actually do and whom does it know in China?
An invitation on the company's site offers the opportunity to meet with "China’s senior governmental and private sector leaders" and "China’s key decision makers".
Who are these senior government officials and how does Empire have access to them?
These are all questions that the media might be asking considering Alexandra Stanton’s long history of access to top Democrat officials, including Obama and Biden, the large checks, and Stanton’s key role at J Street, a domestic group whose funding came from George Soros and, allegedly, Bill Benter , a gambler operating out of Hong Kong. They choose not to ask them.
Alexandra Stanton’s career shows why people join the Democrats, not because they want a fairer world, but because family and political connections pave the path to success, not for the poor, but for wealthy families that are already exceedingly well connected in that world.
The granddaughter of a Greek shipping tycoon became a Democrat operative and fundraiser (and Jewish leader), and while her company claims close access to the officials of a foreign government, she has a powerful position in a foreign policy lobby giving her access to Biden.
Considering Biden’s own longstanding and problematic connections to China, and the role that the Communist dictatorship is allegedly playing in boosting his campaign, this is troubling.
It’s a good thing that the media isn’t interested in asking any tough questions.
IMAGE China Wins if Biden Wins Biden’s disturbing record of pro-China bias.
Mon Sep 14, 2020
Joseph Klein
23
China will have a great friend in the White House if Joe Biden wins the presidency. At the same time, Joe Biden’s son Hunter will acquire more friends in Beijing anxious to do business with a member of the U.S. president’s immediate family in order to gain access to the Oval Office.
Joe Biden has a long record evidencing his pro-China bias. Thus, it was not a surprise when Biden said last year about China: “They’re not bad folks, folks … They’re not competition for us." After Biden received backlash for this remark, Biden’s handlers tried to turn him into a hawk on China. But Biden cannot escape his enabling of China’s rise in power while he was in public office, helping China to become the U.S.’s number one national security threat.
As Barack Obama’s vice president and point man on China, Biden cozied up to China’s Communist Party leaders. At the opening of the third session of the U.S.-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue in May 2011, Biden said that “a rising China is a positive, positive development, not only for China but for America and the world writ large.” Biden characterized the relationship with China sought by the Obama-Biden administration as “a cooperative partnership.”
In August 2011 at a U.S.-China business round table held in Beijing, Biden declared that “President Obama and I, we welcome, encourage and see nothing but positive benefits flowing from direct investment in the United States from Chinese businesses and Chinese entities.”
Following meetings between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping (then-Vice President) in 2011 and 2012, the Obama-Biden administration agreed to allow Chinese companies access to U.S. capital markets without having to go through the same rigorous inspection of their books by U.S. regulators that is required for U.S. companies. Biden’s idea of a “cooperative partnership” was to help boost the economic power of a “rising China” to further heights by handing Chinese companies an opportunity to cheat on a silver platter.
A “rising China” is a positive development only for China. A “rising China” is a very negative development for the United States. China's rapid economic growth, aided by Biden, has enabled the Chinese Communist regime to build up its military and cyber technology to the point that it has become the greatest single threat to our national security.
China did not become our chief adversary on the global stage overnight. China’s economy took off only after it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. And Joe Biden was in China’s corner every step of the way, beginning with his strong advocacy for China’s membership in the WTO while he was in the Senate.
In July 2000, during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on giving permanent normal trade relations status to Communist China, then-Senator Biden asserted as a foregone conclusion that “granting permanent normal trade relations to China has little to do with our national security. It does not increase their access to controlled U.S. technology. It does not increase their access to our markets.” Biden then claimed that bringing the Chinese regime into contact with the international norms of the WTO “is the best way to get China to clean up its act.”
Biden was wrong as usual. The Chinese Communist dictatorship did not clean up its act. It did the opposite. As former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI Kevin R. Brock observed in an article he wrote for The Hill, “China largely has cheated its way to prosperity.” Stealing valuable intellectual property and using deceptive tactics to gain an unfair economic advantage are second nature to the regime and its state-owned companies. The regime's atrocious human rights abuses have gotten much worse.
According to the Economic Policy Institute , “the growing U.S. trade deficit with China has eliminated 3.4 million U.S. jobs between 2001 and 2017, including 1.3 million jobs lost since 2008 (the first full year of the Great Recession).” This all took place since China became a member of the World Trade Organization, right under Biden’s nose and with his help while he was a senator, vice president, and Obama’s point man on China.
The most benign explanation for Biden’s pro-China bias is that he is a fool, who is oblivious to China’s growing threat to the U.S.'s position as the world’s preeminent global economic and military superpower.
There is also a more sinister explanation for Biden’s willingness to give China the benefit of the doubt. Joe Biden’s son Hunter reportedly cashed in while his father was the point person on Obama-Biden administration policy towards China.
Peter Schweitzer, a prominent author on government corruption who put together a documentary entitled “Riding the Dragon: Uncovering the Bidens’ Chinese Secrets,” has exposed Hunter Biden’s involvement in questionable deals with Chinese government affiliated entities while his father was vice president. Schweitzer charged that “the Bidens were prepared and willing to make money, even if it damaged our military posture vis-a-vis the Chinese who are our chief rivals on the global stage.”
Hunter Biden was involved with a Chinese-dominated investment firm called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) through a U.S. company named Rosemont Seneca Partners that Hunter had formed in 2009 with Chris Heinz, the stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, and others. BHR was formed in late 2013 by a merger between the Chinese-government linked firm, Bohai Capital, and Rosemont Seneca Partners.
Around the time of the merger creating BHR, Hunter Biden flew aboard Air Force Two with his father to China. While in China, Hunter helped arrange for Jonathan Li, CEO of Bohai Capital, to “shake hands” with then-Vice President Joe Biden. Hunter Biden met with Li for reportedly a “social meeting.” The coincident timing of Hunter Biden's sojourn to China with his father, the forming of BHR by Bohai Capital and Rosemont, and the father and son face times with Bohai Capital's CEO is suspicious, to say the least. Moreover, the business license of BHR was approved by China shortly after the Biden trip's conclusion. Through its equity participation in BHR’s business, Hunter's firm stood to make a tidy profit.
Last year, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin focusing on the questionable acquisition of a U.S. automotive technology company, Henniges, by a Chinese aviation company and BHR. Henniges’ technology reportedly has military applications. Grassley expressed concerns over the process by which the Obama-Biden administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approved this acquisition.
According to Grassley’s account, “In September 2015, BHR joined with a subsidiary of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) to acquire Henniges for $600 million. Because the acquisition gave Chinese companies direct control of Henniges’ anti-vibration technologies, the transaction was reviewed by CFIUS. CFIUS approved the transaction despite reports that in 2007, years before BHR teamed up with AVIC’s subsidiary, AVIC was reportedly involved in stealing sensitive data regarding the Joint Strike Fighter program. AVIC later reportedly incorporated the stolen data into China’s J-20 and J?31 aircraft.”
Aviation Industry Corporation of China is identified by the Pentagon as one of the Chinese companies “owned by, controlled by, or affiliated with China's government, military, or defense industry." The Obama-Biden administration's approval of the joint acquisition of a U.S. company with military-related technology by an AVIC subsidiary and its partner BHR is highly troubling. Obama’s VP and China point man Joe Biden needs to answer some key questions now as voters consider his candidacy for the U.S. presidency.
For example, what interactions did CFIUS members or their staffs have with Obama, Biden or their staffs on the Henniges transaction? What did Joe Biden know about the joint acquisition of Henniges by BHR (in which his son's firm had an equity interest) and a subsidiary of the Chinese government affiliated AVIC? Did Biden or his staff exert any pressure on CFIUS to approve the Henniges acquisition despite its obvious national security implications? Was the Henniges transaction subject to a national security arrangement? If not, why not?
Joe Biden needs to answer these questions and others now without equivocation concerning the Chinese-related business dealings of Hunter Biden’s firm while Joe Biden was vice president. Otherwise, voters will be entitled to assume the worst about what is likely to lie ahead for U.S.-China relations if Hunter's father Joe Biden is elected president.
A Biden Ally and J Street Vice Chair’s Company Offers Access to Senior Chinese Officials
And what it says about the Democrat Party.
Wed Sep 16, 2020
Daniel Greenfield
8
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
“Meet and build relationships with China’s senior governmental and private sector leaders in your chosen area of business,” the invitation on the site of Empire Global Ventures read. “Join us for elite curated experiences with the people who decide the future of China’s tech sector, craft and enforce its regulations, dominate its industries and chart its path forward.”
The only thing more intriguing than the invitation may be Empire Global Ventures whose CEO is also the Vice Chair of the board of J Street and a prominent Democrat donor and fundraiser.
When Governor Andrew Cuomo split up with his celebrity girlfriend after over a decade of shacking up together, media accounts made sure to mention the role of Alexandra Stanto in introducing the formerly happy couple.
As the CEO of Empire Global Ventures, Stanton has come a long way since then. But the name of her company closely echoes Empire State Development, an arm of the New York State government, where Stanton had served as chief of staff from 2006 through 2008.
Stanton had worked for David Patterson, back when he was in the State Senate. Then Eliot Spitzer, New York's megalomaniacal Attorney General picked Patterson, the black and partly blind Senate Majority Leader, as his running mate, to score with voters.
Patterson was never expected to actually take the governor's office, but then Spitzer imploded, after allegations of prostitution and thuggish behavior, and was forced to step down.
Stanton, who had been Patterson’s deputy campaign manager for policy, and Sam Natapoff, her husband, had scored six figure gigs with Empire State Development, with Sam earning the grand title of, “Senior Advisor to the Governor of New York State for International Commerce.” Today, Sam is the president of Empire Global Ventures and writes editorials attacking President Trump over his work to help Americans resist China’s abusive trade policies.
Stanton and her husband had been pumping sizable amounts of money into Paterson and Cuomo's war chests. Stanton alone had donated $10,000 to both Paterson and Cuomo. But Stanton’s fundraising soon went national with an Obama fundraiser running as much as $20,000 a ticket. And Obama named Stanton a general trustee of the Kennedy Center.
The money has kept on rolling out with Stanton donating thousands to Mayor Bill de Blasio and scoring an $8,000 per month consulting job for City Hall.
By then, Stanton had become the vice chair of J Street: a key anti-Israel lobby group.
Alexandra Stanton has spent the last 12 years serving as Vice Chair of the anti-Israel group originally funded by George Soros and has, in media accounts, been dubbed a “Jewish leader.”
Alexandra is the granddaughter of Hellenic Lines shipping tycoon Pericles Callimanopulos. The Greek tycoon’s funeral service was held at the Greek Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Manhattan.
Pericles' daughter and Alexandra's mother, Domna Stanton, a feminist academic who is a longtime board member of Human Rights Watch and had a prominent role at Planned Parenthood, was named by De Blasio as one of New York City’s human rights commissioners.
Domna and her husband Frank, a successful entrepreneur who had made his mark helping his brother Arthur import the Volkswagen Beetle to America and trying to launch an early VCR, showed up in Tom Wolfe's famously mocking profile of Leonard Bernstein's Black Panther party.
The Stanton family has connections by marriage to socialites from New York to D.C. and Domna’s Hamptons garden parties are required attendance for celebrities and the smart set.
Alexandra Stanton has kept up the tradition with cocktail parties attended by none other than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She was on the host committee for Hillary Clinton’s million dollar fundraiser for Bill de Blasio, and, more recently, she took part in a Joe Biden fundraiser.
When Pelosi spoke at the anti-Israel J Street’s gala, she thanked Stanton by name.
And when Obama descended into ugly antisemitic attacks against Jewish opponents of the Iran Deal, Alexandra Stanton was there to claim that he “has a right to combat what he thinks are campaigns against him laden with non-facts and offensive statements.”
But Alexandra has a lot of irons in the fire besides campaigning against the Jewish State.
These days, Stanton has also been marketing Little Lives PPE face shields for children, scoring a FOX profile, who described the politically connected Democrat, as a "mom". The Wall Street Journal mentioned Stanton's face shields for children in its article on reopening schools alongside a quote from Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers.
The American Federation of Teachers, the country's largest network of Democrat teachers' unions, had its PPE purchases facilitated by Stanton and Empire Global Ventures.
Randi Weingarten, the AFT's head, who recently faced criticism for claiming that it's not safe for teachers to go back to school even while attending Al Sharpton's 50,000 strong rally in D.C., was described as knowing "people at Empire Global Ventures, a business development firm with experience in China, where much of the world’s PPE is manufactured."
This wasn't the only strange intersection between Empire, Democrats, and the coronavirus.
The sister-in-law of Chris Cuomo, a CNN anchor and Governor Cuomo's brother, works for Empire Global Ventures, and has been touting hypochlorous acid from Y2X Life Sciences as an answer to the coronavirus. Cuomo's sister-in-law claimed that spraying hypochlorous acid could keep businesses safe from the virus. Alexandra Stanton and her husband are listed as Y2X Life Sciences advisers, along with Matt Kennedy, RFK’s grandson and Joe Kennedy III’s brother, who sits on the boards of Kennedy institutions, and had held down various positions in the Obama administration, along with Dick Gephardt, the former Democrat House Majority Leader.
In July, a job posting for Empire Global Ventures described it as a medical products company.
What does Empire Global Ventures actually do and whom does it know in China?
An invitation on the company's site offers the opportunity to meet with "China’s senior governmental and private sector leaders" and "China’s key decision makers".
Who are these senior government officials and how does Empire have access to them?
These are all questions that the media might be asking considering Alexandra Stanton’s long history of access to top Democrat officials, including Obama and Biden, the large checks, and Stanton’s key role at J Street, a domestic group whose funding came from George Soros and, allegedly, Bill Benter , a gambler operating out of Hong Kong. They choose not to ask them.
Alexandra Stanton’s career shows why people join the Democrats, not because they want a fairer world, but because family and political connections pave the path to success, not for the poor, but for wealthy families that are already exceedingly well connected in that world.
The granddaughter of a Greek shipping tycoon became a Democrat operative and fundraiser (and Jewish leader), and while her company claims close access to the officials of a foreign government, she has a powerful position in a foreign policy lobby giving her access to Biden.
Considering Biden’s own longstanding and problematic connections to China, and the role that the Communist dictatorship is allegedly playing in boosting his campaign, this is troubling.
It’s a good thing that the media isn’t interested in asking any tough questions.
China Wins if Biden Wins
Biden’s disturbing record of pro-China bias.
Mon Sep 14, 2020
Joseph Klein
China will have a great friend in the White House if Joe Biden wins the presidency. At the same time, Joe Biden’s son Hunter will acquire more friends in Beijing anxious to do business with a member of the U.S. president’s immediate family in order to gain access to the Oval Office.
Joe Biden has a long record evidencing his pro-China bias. Thus, it was not a surprise when Biden said last year about China: “They’re not bad folks, folks … They’re not competition for us." After Biden received backlash for this remark, Biden’s handlers tried to turn him into a hawk on China. But Biden cannot escape his enabling of China’s rise in power while he was in public office, helping China to become the U.S.’s number one national security threat.
As Barack Obama’s vice president and point man on China, Biden cozied up to China’s Communist Party leaders. At the opening of the third session of the U.S.-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue in May 2011, Biden said that “a rising China is a positive, positive development, not only for China but for America and the world writ large.” Biden characterized the relationship with China sought by the Obama-Biden administration as “a cooperative partnership.”
In August 2011 at a U.S.-China business round table held in Beijing, Biden declared that “President Obama and I, we welcome, encourage and see nothing but positive benefits flowing from direct investment in the United States from Chinese businesses and Chinese entities.”
Following meetings between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping (then-Vice President) in 2011 and 2012, the Obama-Biden administration agreed to allow Chinese companies access to U.S. capital markets without having to go through the same rigorous inspection of their books by U.S. regulators that is required for U.S. companies. Biden’s idea of a “cooperative partnership” was to help boost the economic power of a “rising China” to further heights by handing Chinese companies an opportunity to cheat on a silver platter.
A “rising China” is a positive development only for China. A “rising China” is a very negative development for the United States. China's rapid economic growth, aided by Biden, has enabled the Chinese Communist regime to build up its military and cyber technology to the point that it has become the greatest single threat to our national security.
China did not become our chief adversary on the global stage overnight. China’s economy took off only after it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. And Joe Biden was in China’s corner every step of the way, beginning with his strong advocacy for China’s membership in the WTO while he was in the Senate.
In July 2000, during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on giving permanent normal trade relations status to Communist China, then-Senator Biden asserted as a foregone conclusion that “granting permanent normal trade relations to China has little to do with our national security. It does not increase their access to controlled U.S. technology. It does not increase their access to our markets.” Biden then claimed that bringing the Chinese regime into contact with the international norms of the WTO “is the best way to get China to clean up its act.”
Biden was wrong as usual. The Chinese Communist dictatorship did not clean up its act. It did the opposite. As former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI Kevin R. Brock observed in an article he wrote for The Hill, “China largely has cheated its way to prosperity.” Stealing valuable intellectual property and using deceptive tactics to gain an unfair economic advantage are second nature to the regime and its state-owned companies. The regime's atrocious human rights abuses have gotten much worse.
According to the Economic Policy Institute , “the growing U.S. trade deficit with China has eliminated 3.4 million U.S. jobs between 2001 and 2017, including 1.3 million jobs lost since 2008 (the first full year of the Great Recession).” This all took place since China became a member of the World Trade Organization, right under Biden’s nose and with his help while he was a senator, vice president, and Obama’s point man on China.
The most benign explanation for Biden’s pro-China bias is that he is a fool, who is oblivious to China’s growing threat to the U.S.'s position as the world’s preeminent global economic and military superpower.
There is also a more sinister explanation for Biden’s willingness to give China the benefit of the doubt. Joe Biden’s son Hunter reportedly cashed in while his father was the point person on Obama-Biden administration policy towards China.
Peter Schweitzer, a prominent author on government corruption who put together a documentary entitled “Riding the Dragon: Uncovering the Bidens’ Chinese Secrets,” has exposed Hunter Biden’s involvement in questionable deals with Chinese government affiliated entities while his father was vice president. Schweitzer charged that “the Bidens were prepared and willing to make money, even if it damaged our military posture vis-a-vis the Chinese who are our chief rivals on the global stage.”
Hunter Biden was involved with a Chinese-dominated investment firm called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) through a U.S. company named Rosemont Seneca Partners that Hunter had formed in 2009 with Chris Heinz, the stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, and others. BHR was formed in late 2013 by a merger between the Chinese-government linked firm, Bohai Capital, and Rosemont Seneca Partners.
Around the time of the merger creating BHR, Hunter Biden flew aboard Air Force Two with his father to China. While in China, Hunter helped arrange for Jonathan Li, CEO of Bohai Capital, to “shake hands” with then-Vice President Joe Biden. Hunter Biden met with Li for reportedly a “social meeting.” The coincident timing of Hunter Biden's sojourn to China with his father, the forming of BHR by Bohai Capital and Rosemont, and the father and son face times with Bohai Capital's CEO is suspicious, to say the least. Moreover, the business license of BHR was approved by China shortly after the Biden trip's conclusion. Through its equity participation in BHR’s business, Hunter's firm stood to make a tidy profit.
Last year, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin focusing on the questionable acquisition of a U.S. automotive technology company, Henniges, by a Chinese aviation company and BHR. Henniges’ technology reportedly has military applications. Grassley expressed concerns over the process by which the Obama-Biden administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approved this acquisition.
According to Grassley’s account, “In September 2015, BHR joined with a subsidiary of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) to acquire Henniges for $600 million. Because the acquisition gave Chinese companies direct control of Henniges’ anti-vibration technologies, the transaction was reviewed by CFIUS. CFIUS approved the transaction despite reports that in 2007, years before BHR teamed up with AVIC’s subsidiary, AVIC was reportedly involved in stealing sensitive data regarding the Joint Strike Fighter program. AVIC later reportedly incorporated the stolen data into China’s J-20 and J?31 aircraft.”
Aviation Industry Corporation of China is identified by the Pentagon as one of the Chinese companies “owned by, controlled by, or affiliated with China's government, military, or defense industry." The Obama-Biden administration's approval of the joint acquisition of a U.S. company with military-related technology by an AVIC subsidiary and its partner BHR is highly troubling. Obama’s VP and China point man Joe Biden needs to answer some key questions now as voters consider his candidacy for the U.S. presidency.
For example, what interactions did CFIUS members or their staffs have with Obama, Biden or their staffs on the Henniges transaction? What did Joe Biden know about the joint acquisition of Henniges by BHR (in which his son's firm had an equity interest) and a subsidiary of the Chinese government affiliated AVIC? Did Biden or his staff exert any pressure on CFIUS to approve the Henniges acquisition despite its obvious national security implications? Was the Henniges transaction subject to a national security arrangement? If not, why not?
Joe Biden needs to answer these questions and others now without equivocation concerning the Chinese-related business dealings of Hunter Biden’s firm while Joe Biden was vice president. Otherwise, voters will be entitled to assume the worst about what is likely to lie ahead for U.S.-China relations if Hunter's father Joe Biden is elected president.
JOE BIDEN SAYS MUCK PROGRESSIVES, I MADE MY DIRTY MONEY SERVING WALL STREET…and Red China!
“Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.”
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-bidens-america-to-be-ruled-by-wall.html
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry players,” noted Protocol , an online publication that covers technology.”
“He was presumably referring to the two dozen agency review team officials who come from law firms like Arnold & Porter. Or to the 40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists .”
“During the summer, the American Prospect published a lengthy exposé about Biden’s foreign policy advisers’ lucrative foray into corporate America . Many are set to return to the highest echelons of official Washington.”
Pinkerton: Joe’s Presidency Is Building Hunter Biden Back Bigger JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images 12:16
Catch Me If You Can
We’ve been hearing a lot these days about the Biden administration’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better (BBB) plan that has been tangled up in Congress with uncertain prospects of success.
However, there’s one Biden plan that’s going along nicely.
That would be the BHBBB plan, which stands for Building Hunter Biden Back Bigger. Bigger as in bigger bank account.
As Breitbart News reported recently , “Hunter Biden, the president’s son, reportedly sold at least five pieces of art for $75,000 each at his Los Angeles exhibit on October 1.” To put that another way, that’s $375,000—at least . How much of that goes to Hunter? How much for middlemen? And how much for anyone else?
These are all important questions, but unfortunately we don’t have any answers because Hunter’s not telling. A s he said recently of the critical and the curious, “F*ck ‘em.”
In response, ethics experts have stated the obvious, namely that there should be full transparency about Hunter’s financial affairs. And yet the White House is having none of that full disclosure stuff.
Just on October 12, when asked by Breitbart News’ Charlie Spiering about Hunter’s art sales, White House press secretary Jen Psaki answered , “We still do not know and will not know who purchases any paintings and the president remains proud of his son.”
The White House Got that? With apologies to Sergeant Schultz of Hogan’s Heroes , “We see nothing! We know nothing!” (This at the same time when the Biden administration wants the IRS to track every American’s transactions over $600.)
In the meantime, we are supposed to trust Hunter, his art dealer, and his art purchasers—whoever they might be.
So we have no idea if Hunter is making thousands or hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions from his art gig. It’s all a giant question mark. And yet at the same time, lots of money from who knows where is hiding in plain sight.
But there’s one thing we can be sure of: Hunter has needed money. Yes, he’s made millions in a three-decade career basking in the golden aura of his famous father, and yet he’s also spent money like a drunken sailor—or most specifically, like a crack addict.
For more insight into Hunter’s high life and high times, we might consider the candid assessment rendered by one of his business contacts. Back in January 2015, when Joe Biden was vice president, one wheeler-dealer wrote an e-mail to another wheeler-dealer laying out the upsides and downsides of hiring Hunter to work on a Libya deal.
The upside was that Hunter “has access to highest level in PRC.” That is, the People’s Republic of China. Yet there were were downsides too: “His negatives are that he is alcoholic, drug addict – kicked [out] of U.S. Army for cocaine, chasing low class hookers, constantly needs money-liquidity problems and many more headaches.” (Correction: Hunter was kicked out of the U.S. Navy .)
Hunter did not get that gig.
We can also look to another close observer, Hunter’s now-ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle Biden, who declared in a 2017 court filing , “Mr. Biden has created financial concerns for the family by spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations) while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.”
Such bad-boy behavior culminated in the notorious case of Hunter’s laptop. Reports on that wayward machine—and of all those juicy files and videos—first appeared in the New York Post in October 2020, just three weeks prior to the presidential election. And yet as we all remember, the Post’s reports were suppressed not only by the Main Stream Media, but also by Silicon Valley social media. And this suppressing seems to have had a substantial effect on the election. A poll taken a few days after the voting revealed that if Americans had known the full story of Hunter’s laptop–and that its contents were true and not Russian forgeries–Donald Trump would have been re-elected. (A year later, the Post recalled ruefully of the story-suppressors, “None of them has learned any lesson except that it worked : Big Tech and Big Media got their way, at the expense of our democracy.”)
Okay, so back to Hunter. After all this trouble, one might have assumed that Hunter would want to fade into obscurity. But anyone who thought that did not know Hunter!
The son was prominent at his father’s inaugural, being seen frequently in the company of the new 46th president. What Russian or Chinese billionaire—to say nothing of every other billionaire around the world, the kind that has hired Hunter in the past—could have failed to notice this proximity? One might even say that it’s as if Hunter was standing there next to his father with a giant neon sign proclaiming, “I’M WITH HIM! I CAN GET TO HIM!!”
Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, as Jill Biden holds the Bible and his children, Hunter and Ashley, stand next to them. (Saul Loeb/Pool Photo via AP)
President Joe Biden hugs first lady Jill Biden and his son Hunter Biden after being sworn-in during his inauguration on January 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
During this time, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) wondered aloud whether Hunter should have registered with the Justice Department under the legal requirements of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). In fact, no member of the Biden family—and many of them became international political operators—has ever registered under FARA.
We should note that Politico reported in June that the Justice Department was investigating possible FARA violations by a firm connected to Hunter, and so we’ll have to see where, if anywhere, that goes.
Yet in the meantime, Hunter, being always a Biden, was putting himself even more on display. This spring he published a memoir, in which he wrote of himself, “I was smoking crack every 15 minutes.”
And just like Joe Biden, Hunter was talking plenty. As he said during his book tour in April, “Yeah, I went one time for 13 days without sleeping, and smoking crack, and drinking vodka exclusively throughout that entire time.”
Yet interestingly enough, his past wastrel ways notwithstanding, Hunter still seems to be doing fine. Last July, it was reported that he lives in a 3,000-square-foot house in Malibu overlooking the Pacific Ocean that rents for $20,000 a month.
Hunter Biden’s memoir is seen on display in a Washington, DC, book store on April 6, 2021. In an interview with the BBC to promote his book, Hunter Biden confirmed allegations that he benefited from his family name when his father was vice president. (AGNES BUN/AFP via Getty Images)
So where is his money coming from? Might he, for instance, have received some sort of advance payment for his art or for anything else? In recent months, this author has speculated on these and other possibilities, here , and here , although it’s hard to keep up with all the possible sources and suspicions. There always seems to be more. For example, on October 15, we learned of yet another of Hunter’s Chinese business deals when the Washington Free Beacon revealed a new trove of his emails from a decade ago, in which Hunter conceded (or bragged ?) that his value to the Chinese “had everything to do with my last name.”
We can step back and see: All during his time as a cocaine addict with shady business dealings with the Chinese and other foreign entities (remember Burisma ?), Hunter has been playing an extended game of Catch Me If You Can. And yet official Washington and all those media watchdogs have shown little interest in even reporting on him, let alone catching him. Maybe that’s why there’s been no Robert Mueller-style special counsel investigation.
But this lack of interest could finally be changing. The establishment media might finally be catching up.
The White House The Delaware Way and the Maryland Way
A reporter named Ben Schreckinger at Politico has been on the Biden family beat for some time now, and his impact is being felt. Back in July 2020, Schreckinger published an article on the Biden family’s financial dealings, national and international.
Notably, the Politico man took note of the “Delaware Way,” which the journalist defined as “a culture of favor trading and cronyism.” Schreckinger added that local prosecutors, pursuing a case that overlapped with (but did not implicate) the Biden family, further defined the Delaware Way as “a form of soft corruption, intersecting business and political interests, which has existed in this State for years.”
At the time, Schreckinger’s article caused a ripple, but only a ripple; as we know, the Main Stream Media’s big push last year was getting rid of Trump.
Yet just last month, Schreckinger published a not-so-flattering book , The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power. Among the book’s assertions was that the Hunter Biden laptop is for real , and that at least some of the contents of that machine are substantially what the New York Post reported them to be last year.
One reporter’s confirmation of an earlier report might not seem to be that big a deal, and yet unlike the New York Post , Politico is a member in good standing of the MSM club—and so MSM types couldn’t ignore Schreckinger’s work. And we should add that Schreckinger has done a great deal of digging into the Delaware Way, such that the whole Biden family—which has done well for themselves thanks to Joe—now perhaps has reason to be concerned.
So now, who knows where the Hunter trail could lead. And yet some twists are already evident. For instance, on October 8, the Biden White House rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilege in regard to his attempt to shield former aides from subpoenas concerning the January 6 investigation.
Okay, so it wasn’t too surprising that the Biden White House would do that, and yet as Trump himself pointed out , a rejection of the 45th president’s claim of executive privilege could lead to the future rejection of the 46th president’s claim of privilege in re: Hunter. As they say, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. A nd Hunter and his enablers could yet be in the soup.
And just on October 12, Schreckinger published a piece in Politico in which he reported that “Hunter Biden had in fact received an email containing the ’10 held by H for the big guy?’ language.”
As they say about explosive news stories, ka-boom. That “10 being held by H” language appears to be a reference to 10 percent of the equity in a Chinese company, and “H” of course, is Hunter, and the “big guy” is thought to be . . . Joe Biden .
It should be noted that the New York Post reported on this exact same email on October 15, 2020. But now that Politico is reporting it, the rest of the MSM must pay heed. In fact, Schreckinger’s story was retweeted by a New York Times reporter—and that’s MSM royalty.
Hmm. Ten percent for the big guy . Let that rattle around for a while.
So now our thoughts must turn darker: What if the real story isn’t Hunter, but Joe?
If so, then our thoughts on the 47th vice president, Joe Biden, might beg comparison to the 39th vice president. That would be Spiro Agnew, the onetime governor of Maryland who became Richard Nixon’s vice president in 1969. Four years later, he was implicated in a home-state corruption investigation and forced to resign.
Vice President Spiro T. Agnew refutes allegations that he was involved in political payoffs during a press conference on August 8, 1973. He said “absolutely not” when asked if he was giving any thought to resigning. (AP Photo)
We’ve already learned about the “Delaware Way,” defined by a prosecutor as “a form of soft corruption.” Well, any resident of Maryland, which adjoins Delaware, knows that there’s also a Maryland Way. Indeed, surveying the long history of crookedness in the state’s politics—including Agnew, another recent governor, and two mayors of Baltimore—one political analyst said in 2019, “It’s almost like corruption is part of American political DNA in the state of Maryland.”
Of course, we shouldn’t pick on either Maryland or Delaware, because as we know, corruption is a blight on every region of the country. Still, corruption does seem to be worse in big cities. And so just as Maryland has Baltimore, so Delaware has Wilmington—which is, of course, a part of greater Philadelphia.
And so if someone—a whole family, in fact—has flourished in that sort of grey-zone for decades, well, it’s reasonable to ask: What could be discovered about such a family if reporters and other investigators go digging?
Could Joe Biden really be another Spiro Agnew? As of now, there’s no way to know. However, one thing we do know: Spiro Agnew never had a son like Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden waves to someone while attending a farewell ceremony in Delaware for his father on the day before Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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