First brother Jim Biden provided explosive new details about his nephew Hunter Biden’s previously undisclosed meetings with a corrupt Chinese businessman, whom Hunter has called the "f—ing spy chief of China."
In a congressional deposition last month, Jim Biden said he accompanied Hunter Biden to Hong Kong in September 2017 to meet with Patrick Ho, an executive with Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC China Energy. Weeks earlier, CEFC China Energy paid Hunter and Jim Biden $5 million as part of a joint venture to find investments for the Chinese firm.
The Biden family’s arrangement with CEFC China Energy has stoked national security concerns because of the Chinese firm’s links to Chinese military intelligence. Middlemen for CEFC China Energy approached Hunter Biden in 2015, when his father was vice president, about potential business deals.
According to Jim Biden, he and Hunter Biden had a "pleasant" lunch in Hong Kong with Ho, who also served as head of the China Energy Fund Committee, a think tank funded by CEFC China Energy. At the end of the meeting, Ho asked to meet alone with Hunter Biden, according to Uncle Jim.
"Ho said, ‘Can I borrow Hunter for, you know, a half-hour? We're going to go in the next room,’" said Jim Biden, who claimed ignorance about what his nephew discussed behind closed doors.
Biden’s testimony is likely to raise questions about Hunter’s previously unknown interaction with a man he has described as "the f—ing spy chief of China." Hunter Biden made that remark about Ho in an audio recording dated May 11, 2018.
Just two months after Hunter Biden’s secret conclave with Ho, federal prosecutors in New York indicted Ho on charges that he offered bribes to African officials to obtain oil rights for CEFC China Energy during a meeting at the UN General Assembly in 2014.
CEFC China Energy paid Hunter Biden $1 million to represent Ho, though Hunter Biden appears not to have done any legal work on the case. According to court records, the American government obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to surveil Ho on the basis that he was a possible agent of a foreign government.
Jim Biden provided congressional investigators other details about how CEFC China Energy entered the Biden orbit. He said that the father of a classmate of Hunter Biden’s daughter contacted Biden about working with CEFC China Energy. Jim Biden said the man gave Hunter Biden a diamond ring. The Washington Free Beacon reported that the man, Scott Oh, approached Hunter Biden in October 2015 to discuss "investment opportunities" involving CEFC China Energy.
Jim Biden told lawmakers he had no idea why his nephew was invited to Hong Kong to meet with Ho, a claim that was met with skepticism from Republicans in the deposition.
"If [Hunter] wanted to volunteer what it was, he would've told me. I didn't pry into what he was doing," Biden testified.
Jim Biden said he hired a former Secret Service official who worked on President Joe Biden’s security detail to investigate Ho before the trip. He said the background check did not reveal anything negative about Ho.
Republicans said they found it "odd" that Jim Biden "would go to such lengths to hire a private investigator" to check into Patrick Ho, but that he wouldn’t ask Hunter Biden the purpose of the Hong Kong trip.
"The way that we deal in my family, it wasn’t odd," Biden replied.