A recorded November 2020 lecture by a prominent Chinese political science professor boasted that over the past three or four decades Beijing had infiltrated "people at the top of America's core inner circle," with recent direct references to then-President-elect Joe Biden's son Hunter and his family business dealings in the Communist country.
The assertion by Di Dongsheng, vice dean of the School of International Relations at Renmin University, included a statement that under resistance from President Donald Trump "During the U.S.-China trade war, [Wall Street] tried to help and I know that my friends on the U.S. side told me that they tried to help, but they couldn't do much," adding that a Biden presidency would benefit China.
Referring specifically to China and Ukraine business deals, Di explained: "Trump has been saying that Biden's son has some sort of global foundation. Have you noticed that? Who helped [Hunter] build the foundations? Got it? There are a lot of deals inside all these."
The audience can be heard laughing in knowing approval.
There's little wonder why Biden family eagerness to cash in on Joe's positions of government policy influence would make him a prime target of exploitive opportunity.
According to Peter Schweizer at the New York Post, the Biden family has done five deals in China totaling some $31 million arranged by individuals with direct ties to Chinese intelligence — some reaching the very top of China's spy agency.
"Indeed," Schweizer writes,"every known deal that the Biden family enjoyed with Beijing was reached courtesy of individuals with spy ties. And Joe Biden personally benefited from his family's foreign deals."
Included is a $1.5 billion deal Hunter inked for his company with the Communist state-owned Bank of China 10 days after returning with his vice president dad on a 2013 trip to Beijing aboard Air Force Two.
Then there's that 10% cut to be held for "the big guy," documented in an email communication referencing CEFC, a now-defunct company closely associated with the Chinese regime which reportedly paid Hunter and Jim Biden $4.8 million in 2017-2018.
Emails from Hunter Biden's laptop also show that Hunter was involved in launching the Penn Biden Center where the first tranche of Joe Biden's illegally removed classified documents dating back to his term as a U.S. senator were found.
At least some of the documents had been held over six months in a temporary location in the Washington, D.C., Chinatown neighborhood after being been packed for transfer in 2017 by a former Biden administrative assistant, Kathy Chung, who had been recommended for the position by Hunter.
Still more classified Biden documents have been mysteriously turning up at a variety of other different locations, including Joe and Jill Biden's private residence and boxes carelessly stored in their garage in Wilmington, Delaware, where Hunter also stayed.
More suspiciously concerning, we now know that Hunter had also previously worked to arrange for keys to be made for "office mates" at another private office space listing his father, Jill Biden, his uncle Jim Biden, and Gongwen Dong, a person he described as an "emissary" for Chairman Ye Jianming — the chairman of CEFC.
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, has demanded that the FBI provide information about known Chinese Communist Party links to Hunter's former secretary JiaQi "Jackie" Bao during the time he and his uncle James Biden may have garnered profits from CEFC regarding a potential U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) purchase Bao and the Bidens sought to sell to China.
Bao had told Hunter Biden, Jim Biden and CEFC associates in an email that "my job is to make sure our interest is protected."
In documents obtained by committee Republicans, Hunter Biden refers to the founder and chairman of CEFC [Ye Jianming] as his 'partner' and the vice chairman of CEFC, Patrick Ho, as his client and the 'f*****g spy chief of China."
Whether or not potential Beijing extortion leverage over Biden has influenced his China policies — and can be proven to have done so — the optics are ugly.
Perhaps it's only a coincidence that President Biden disbanded former President Trump's China Initiative established to combat technical spying at universities and research following a letter from his Penn Biden Center to Attorney General Merrick Garland urging him to do so.
Maybe we shouldn't draw any inferences from the fact that Biden also ended Trump restrictions against TikTok, a huge Chinese social media company which reportedly mines users' personal data, or that he also dropped the previous administration's investigations into convincing evidence that the COVID-19 virus that has killed more than a million in the U.S. may have begun in a Wuhan lab.
Nor should we probably have any reason to question why the Biden Department of Energy sold nearly a million barrels of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the midst of an oil shortage to Sinopec, a Chinese company in which Hunter's firm, BHR Partners, had purchased a $1.7 billion stake seven years previously.
Nope ... likely nothing to see here.
But just on an outside chance that some "conspiracy theorists" might imagine otherwise, maybe it would be a reasonable idea for the DOJ to connect lots of remarkable coincidences regarding China extortion opportunities that fundamentally compromise American public and allied nation trust in leadership decisions of immeasurable global importance.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.