On Monday, The New Yorker published a lengthy article detailing the various scandals involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. The article asked the question: “Will Hunter Biden Jeopardize His Father’s Campaign?”
The answer is fairly obvious: No.
Democrats and their families are treated differently than Republicans and their families. If these scandals involved Jared Kushner or President Donald Trump’s children, every media outlet would be covering them.
The New Yorker article described some of the issues Hunter faces that have been previously reported by The Daily Wire, including his contract with Chinese businessmen that came shortly after he traveled to Beijing with his father on official business while still vice president.
Deep within the article lies a section about Hunter’s dealings with Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming. As the New Yorker’s Adam Entous wrote, “a large diamond” was referenced in one of Kathleen Biden’s (Hunter’s ex-wife) motions during their divorce. This diamond was given to Hunter by Ye after the two met sometime after President Barack Obama left office. Hunter told Entous that he and two associates met with Ye in Miami and gifted him a bottle of Scotch “worth thousands of dollars.”
Hunter told Entous he was trying to get a large donation from Ye for the World Food Program USA, on whose board he sat. Over dinner, the two discussed the donation and business opportunities. Ye wanted to invest in liquefied-natural-gas projects in the U.S. and wanted Hunter to help him make connections. After the dinner, Hunter was given the diamond. From Entous:
After the dinner, Ye sent a 2.8-carat diamond to Hunter’s hotel room with a card thanking him for their meeting. “I was, like, Oh, my God,” Hunter said. (In Kathleen’s court motion, the diamond is estimated to be worth eighty thousand dollars. Hunter said he believes the value is closer to ten thousand.) When I asked him if he thought the diamond was intended as a bribe, he said no: “What would they be bribing me for? My dad wasn’t in office.” Hunter said that he gave the diamond to his associates, and doesn’t know what they did with it. “I knew it wasn’t a good idea to take it. I just felt like it was weird,” he said.
Of course, the “bribe” didn’t need to have anything to do with Hunter’s father Joe. Further, it has been pretty much assumed since after the 2016 election that Joe Biden would run for president in 2020, and he certainly would still have pull in the U.S. even without being vice president, so Hunter’s claims that the “bribe” would be worthless are inaccurate.
After the meeting, Hunter went to work helping Ye negotiate “a deal for CEFC to invest forty million dollars in a liquefied-natural-gas project on Monkey Island, in Louisiana,” Entous wrote.
When Ye told Hunter he was concerned that his associate, Patrick Ho, was under investigation by U.S. authorities, Hunter represented Ho. Ho was eventually sentenced to three years in prison for bribing government officials in Chad and Uganda. Less than a year later, Ye was detained by Chinese authorities and the Monkey Island deal was abandoned.