Among the scandals involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, is one including a lucrative deal with the Bank of China.
Hunter Biden was able to secure a billion-dollar contract with the Bank of China back in 2013, just weeks after his father, the U.S. vice president, took him to China while on official business, according to reporter Peter Schweizer’s latest book, “Secret Empires.” The book was released last March, but Schweizer recently took to the pages of the New York Post to explain how Hunter’s dealings with China could be a problem for his father’s 2020 presidential campaign.
A week earlier, Biden defended China from President Donald Trump’s criticism, saying, “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.”
Schweizer theorizes that Biden dismissed concerns about China because of his son’s business relationship with the state-owned bank.
“If it sounds shocking that a vice president would shape US-China policy as his son — who has scant experience in private equity — clinched a coveted billion-dollar deal with an arm of the Chinese government, that’s because it is,” Schweizer wrote at the Post.
Though Biden had “scant experience in private equity,” he partnered with others to create Rosemont Seneca Partners, which he created with former Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson, Chris Heinz, and his associate, Devon Archer. An offshoot of this company, Rosemont Seneca Bohai, worked to secure the China deal — less than a year after the main firm was created. Biden and Archer partnered with The Thornton Group, a consultant firm lead by James Bulger, nephew of infamous mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, after whom the former was named.
Biden’s partner was not in any way connected to his uncle’s crimes. Heinz, in a statement sent to The Daily Wire through a spokesperson, was not involved in the China deal and has never even been to China.
As Schweizer wrote, the Thornton Group’s recounting of the meeting with Chinese executives describes a “warm welcome” to the “Thornton Group, with its US partner Rosemont Seneca chairman Hunter Biden (second son of the now Vice President Joe Biden).”
Schweizer sees something seedy in the meeting, as it came “just hours before Hunter Biden’s father, the vice president, met with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Washington as part of the Nuclear Security Summit.”
All of this occurred just 12 days after Hunter accompanied his father on an official trip to China.
“It was an unprecedented arrangement: the government of one of America’s fiercest competitors going into business with the son of one of America’s most powerful decisionmakers,” Schweizer wrote.
Heinz, according to Schweizer, said neither he nor Rosemont Seneca Partners were involved with the deal.
Hunter’s dealings with China are not the only business decision currently causing a headache for Joe Biden. In 2016, while still vice president, the elder Biden successfully pressured Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating another company with ties to Hunter: Burisma Holdings. Biden would go on to brag about the prosecutor’s firing without mentioning the investigation involving his son.
Following up on this reporting, The New York Times reported that Hunter “lacked any experience in Ukraine and just months earlier had been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine,” and the Burisma Holdings paid him “as much as $50,000 per month in some months for his work for the company.”
H/t Brent Scher of The Washington Free Beacon
Correction: An earlier version of this article suggested Chris Heinz was part of the Bank of China deal. He was not.
