By Professor Larry Bell
Arguably the most newsworthy story on the cusp of the most important American election in modern history is one that most major media outlets aren’t covering.
Namely, the missing scoop is about a blockbuster October 14 New York Post feature describing details regarding how the Biden family has made a lucrative business peddling Joe’s vice president and potential White House oval office influence to Chinese oligarchs and other foreign adversaries.
The Post obtained the information from thousands of emails, text messages and personal images found on an unclaimed laptop computer now in the FBI’s possession since late 2019 that former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter had left in a Delaware shop for repair.
Notably, although candidate Biden has attempted to dismiss the Post report as a “smear,” neither he nor his campaign have disputed that the authenticity of the laptop nor any of the records contained on it.
In any case, smear or not, Joe declared at a May 2019 campaign event in Iowa City that any concerns about China representing a world superpower military and economic threat are overrated anyway. He explained, “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.”
House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff who famously and falsely claimed to have Russian collusion evidence against President Trump, has predictably once again attributed the Post report to Russian disinformation. Also, once again, there is no evidence of this either.
It would be challenging to convincingly argue otherwise. The Post revelations are presented in meticulous detail with transparently trackable sourcing. This stands in stark contrast to the vague, anonymous attributions of so many Russian collusion stories or the New York Times’s mysteriously sourced “tax-return data” (not tax returns) of Donald Trump.
Hunter’s name appears on the computer dropoff receipt, the repair shop owner supplied a subpoena showing that the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December 2019, and both the FBI and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe have empathically stated that no evidence of Russian disinformation exists.
Charges of disinformation are particularly ironic coming from the same crowd that spent four years pushing the Russia-Trump collusion narrative from 2016 ginned up and promoted by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Recall spurious spinning of salacious Steele dossier claims despite no supporting evidence and no on-the-record witnesses.
There are, however, powerful reasons warranting public attention to the blatant Post story coverup by media omission and censorship. Despite being published by the oldest and fourth largest U.S. newspaper, most networks went to extreme efforts to bomb or bury it.
Exercising a first line of gate-keeper complicity in containing monumental scandals, Twitter, and to a somewhat lesser extent Facebook, immediately sprang to assist Biden campaign defenses by taking extraordinary steps to stop Americans from reading what was already in print.
Twitter users clicking or retweeting a link to the Post story were shown a message that “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”
Included in the shutdowns were Twitter accounts of the entire New York Post’s 1.8 million followers, White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany, the “Team Trump” campaign, and that of Politico.com journalist Jake Sherman.
Even the American taxpayer-supported National Public Radio (NPR) blocked the news. As Terence Samuels, the NPR network’s managing news editor explained, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste our listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
So just what sort of fantasy distractions was NPR referring to?
Well for starters, we learned that Joe had been decidedly untruthful in repeatedly claiming that he knew nothing of his son’s lucrative foreign business dealings with disreputable entities transparently secured based upon his father’s position.
Among the huge tranche of Post documents was an email from an executive of Burisma, a large Ukrainian oil company facing corruption charges, thanking Hunter for “giving an opportunity to meet” his father who was then serving as the Obama administration lead for Ukraine policy.
Hunter was raking in large payments for a no-show position on Burisma’s board at the time when Joe publicly bragged about holding back a billion dollars in desperately needed U.S. military aid to Ukraine if they didn’t fire the prosecutor who was investigating the company’s corruption.
Arguably the most consequential Biden family revelations from U.S. economic and national security perspectives involve spectacularly sleezy and compromising transactions with Chinese oligarchs.
The Post reported that in December 2013, Hunter accompanied his father on an official visit to China aboard Air Force Two, returning with a $1.5 billion investment deal inked ten days later with the Communist state-owned Bank of China on behalf of a private equity firm he had established in 2009 with Christopher Heinz, the stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry.
The transaction was accomplished through Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), a company where again, as with Burisma, Hunter served on its board. A BHR representative reported in July 2019 that Hunter had introduced his father to Chinese private equity executive Jonathan Li during the trip who later became BHR’s CEO.
Another enormously troubling Chinese incident involved Hunter’s May 2017 dealings with Chinese tycoon Ye Jianming, former chairman of CEFC, a now-defunct Shanghai-based energy company with broadly known Communist government and military ties which was later bankrupted following U.S. government money laundering charges.
Numerous records obtained from Hunter’s laptop along with corroborating emails and text messages provided by former Hunter partner Tony Bobulinski make it clear that the Biden family not only profiteered by selling the former veep’s political influence, but also that Joe knew about and fully endorsed the sleezy scheming.
Bobulinski has publicly recounted being introduced to Joe by his brother Jim and son Hunter on May 2, 2017. “That night,” Bobulinski said, “we discussed the Bidens’ history, the Biden family’s plans with the Chinese, with which he [Joe] was plainly familiar, at least at a high level.”
Tony Bobulinski has also produced an email from Hunter’s partner James Gilliar that proposes that the “big guy,” confirmed to mean Joe Biden, receive 10% of the venture’s equity.
An August 2017 email from “Robert Biden” (Hunter’s legal first name) then crows that the original deal which was for $10 million a year in fees, had since become “much more interesting to me and my family” because it included a share of “the equity and profits.”
As Wall Street Journal editors point out: “The Democratic-media refrain is that even if the latest emails are real – again the Bidens don’t deny their authenticity – they fail to prove Biden [by then a private citizen] broke any law. But felonies aren’t the minimum standard for political behavior.”
It was already clear at the time that Joe was considering a presidential run, and that such transparent influence peddling transactions and relationships would deeply compromise his ability to represent America in tough dealings with China and other foreign economic and military adversaries.
Yes, this is truly newsworthy stuff. But no, if Democrats win the White House and Congress, don’t expect to hear much more about it.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once famously pontificated upon announcing President Trump’s sham impeachment that “No one is above the law.” That righteous theory is about to be tested as never before on November 3.