Hunter Biden, American Princeling

 Helen Raleigh, "American Princelings: Hunter Biden and other children of political leaders are favored elites in the Chinese mode"

Mainstream media have mostly ignored or dismissed as “old claims” the interim Senate report into Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings in Ukraine, but the most explosive content in the report may be his engagement with China. The report details how the Democratic presidential nominee’s son has “extensive connections to Chinese businesses and Chinese foreign nationals that are linked to the Communist government.”

Consider, for example, the Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) investment fund, partly owned and directed by Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz, the stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, through their private equity fund, Rosemont Seneca Partners. Chinese companies, including some large state-owned enterprises such as the Bank of China (BOC), controlled and funded 80 percent of BHR, and Chinese government authorities approved the deal to establish the fund after Hunter Biden traveled to China with then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2013.

Why would China’s largest state-owned bank—whose mandate is to support the Chinese government’s strategic goals with capital—want to start a business with a relatively small and unknown American private equity fund? The obvious answer is to buy influence in the United States through the children of two of the most prominent officials in the Obama administration.

Beijing’s investment in BHR soon paid off. In 2015, the fund played a key role in securing approval by the Obama administration and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) for the sale of the Michigan-based Henniges Automotive to one of China’s main military aircraft makers, Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). The approval of this deal surprised many. AVIC had previously been in the news for allegedly stealing “technologies related to the US F-35 stealth fighter,” technologies then used in China’s own new stealth fighter, the J-31.

Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China also led him to work closely with Ye Jianming, chairman of CEFC China Energy, who reportedly has close ties to both the Chinese government and the PLA. Although a private company, CEFC had routinely struck deals that made no business sense but helped the Chinese government advance its geopolitical goals.

In 2016, Hunter Biden’s law firm, Owasco PC, formed Hudson West III LLC (now dissolved) with several Chinese nationals, including Ye’s associate, Gong Wendong. In a transaction the Senate report identified as “potential financial criminal activity,” a CEFC subsidiary funneled money to Hudson West III, which then paid almost $5 million in “consulting fees” to Hunter Biden’s law firm between August 2017 and September 2018.

On the same day that Ye’s CEFC announced THAT it would acquire a $9 billion stake in Rosneft, the state-owned Russian energy company, Gong opened a line of credit for Hudson West III; according to the Senate report, “Hunter Biden, James Biden, and James Biden’s wife, Sara Biden, were all authorized users of credit cards associated with the account. . . . The Bidens subsequently used the credit cards they opened to purchase $101,291.46 worth of extravagant items, including airline tickets and multiple items at Apple Inc. stores, pharmacies, hotels and restaurants.”

All these dealings remind me of a Chinese word, translated in English as “princeling,” which applies to the children of China’s most powerful Communist Party officials. Xi Jinping, China’s current leader for life, is a princeling. His late father, Xi Zhongxun, was a Communist revolutionary who fought alongside Chairman Mao and later became a vice premier of the People’s Republic.

Princelings live very privileged lives. They grow up in walled compounds with security guards and attended elite schools. When China began opening up to the outside world in the early 1980s, they were among the first groups of Chinese students to study abroad. When they returned to China, they usually took up senior positions inside the government or at state-owned companies or joint ventures. Both domestic and foreign companies hoping to seal lucrative business deals in China do everything they can to keep both princelings and their children on the payroll. Monetizing their influence and proximity to political power has allowed them to accumulate enormous wealth.

The Senate report on Hunter Biden is a reminder that the United States is not immune to corruption and abuse of power by the families of elites. Of course, Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz are not the only American princelings. In 2018, the Chinese government approved 16 trademark applications related to Ivanka Trump Marks, LLC within a month. The speed of the approval was unheard of. Would Trump have received this special treatment had she not been the daughter of the president of the United States?

The existence of American princelings, regardless of their political affiliation, is corrosive to our democracy. As Joe Biden himself once said, “corruption is a cancer.” The longer we ignore such corruption and abuse of power by our political elites and their families, the more divided America will become, and the harder it will be to keep our nation intact..

What's "Progressive" About Censorship?

Miranda Devine, " Big Tech is in the Tank for Biden, Democrats"

In case there was any doubt that Facebook and Twitter are corruptly partisan, the social media giants censored The Post’s story Wednesday on Hunter Biden’s emails suggesting he took cash for access to his ­father, Joe Biden.

The bombshell exclusive was trending all Wednesday morning on social media platforms until Big Tech stepped in to run protection for the Democratic presidential candidate.

Facebook announced it would censor the story by “reducing its distribution on our platform.”

Twitter also intervened to protect Biden from the scandal yesterday by blocking The Post’s Twitter account, @nypost, claiming the story violates its rules against “distribution of hacked material.”

Links to the story were tagged by Twitter with a warning message: “This link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”

Twitter later attached a new warning to the story: “The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe.”

But the only “potentially harmful” or “unsafe” impact of The Post story is on the Biden campaign — and, now, on the credibility of Face­book and Twitter.

Did Facebook and Twitter impose the same censorship on the New York Times story on President Trump’s leaked — or “hacked” — tax returns two weeks ago?

Did they ever fact-check the Times’ and the Washington Post’s debunked “Russia collusion” tall tales?

Did they interfere with BuzzFeed spreading the Steele Dossier tissue of lies?

Nope.

Big Tech only suppresses information that reflects badly on the Biden campaign.

The emails and photographs we have published speak for themselves. They come from the hard drive of Hunter’s laptop computer, legally obtained by The Post after he abandoned it at a Mac computer repair shop in Delaware.

They tell an alarming story of Biden family grift in Eastern Europe and China, including in Ukraine during the time Joe was vice president in charge of America’s interests there.

The emails we published fly in the face of Joe’s claims that he knew nothing about his son’s lucrative foreign business dealings.

To the contrary, they show a connection between Joe and ­Burisma, the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that was paying Hunter, a chronic drug user with no relevant experience, as much as $83,000 a month for no discernible reason other than for political influence with his father.

One email The Post published showed that, in 2015, a senior member of Burisma thanked Hunter “for the opportunity to meet” his father, then the vice president.

It was months after that introduction that Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid unless the Ukrainian government fired its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who says he was investigating ­Burisma for alleged corruption.

The Post’s story goes to the heart of Joe Biden’s integrity, and American voters deserve to know the details.

To illustrate the incongruity of foreign companies paying such a person millions of dollars, we published one photograph yesterday showing Hunter asleep with a crack pipe in his mouth.

Instead of calling a press conference to respond head-on to the ­allegations, Joe Biden went into hiding Wednesday.

His campaign called a “lid” on in-person events before 9:40 a.m., shutting off the Democratic candidate for president from any interaction with the media all day.

The campaign issued a statement claiming The Post’s story was “discredited.” And it would only say that the meeting didn’t show up on Joe’s “official schedules from the time.”

Even Joe is not silly enough to make such a meeting “official.”

There are clear implications for national security in the material we have published, which indicates the Biden family has leveraged Joe’s position for cash from shady clients overseas.

It is a legitimate news story that deserves answers.

Instead, Biden’s docile media ­allies swallowed his campaign’s obfuscations on Wednesday and tried to smother The Post’s story.

Democratic operative Andy Stone, Facebook’s communications manager, issued a statement via Twitter at 11:10 a.m.: “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be [sic] clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”

Stone, who joined Facebook in 2014 from a Democratic super PAC, has worked for Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

He also just happens to be tied to John Kerry, the former secretary of state who is tied to the Biden family scandal through his stepson Chris Heinz, a one-time business partner of Hunter Biden, as co-owner of private equity firm Rosemont Seneca Partners.

Stone worked for 16 months for the John Kerry for President campaign, as Manchester regional field and “assistant to national director of Veterans for Kerry.”

He is the last person Facebook should have deputized to announce the throttling of The Post’s story.

Make no mistake: This is election interference by unaccountable global tech oligarchs to restrict information that might damage the Democratic Party.

It is coordinated censorship by two of the largest multinational companies in the world. Their monopoly power should be broken up, once and for all.

Bigger Biden threat: China 

The Biden family ties to corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma are disturbing enough, but it is the China connection that has the most potential to damage America’s security interests.

Disturbing questions about Joe Biden are raised over Hunter accompanying his father on Air Force Two to China in December 2013, for an eight-day visit with Communist Party grandees, after which Hunter scored an investment deal reportedly worth as much as $1.5 billion with a subsidiary of the Bank of China.

Joe always has denied his son’s business activities ever influenced US policy.

But, on even the most neutral basis, it is ethically compromising for the son of a vice president and two-time presidential candidate to be engaging in financial transactions with foreign governments, especially with our most potent strategic foe.

As the Obama administration’s point man for China, Joe Biden has boasted about the amount of face time he has had with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“I’ve spent more time in private meetings with Xi Jinping than any world leader,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018.

“I have 25 hours of private dinners with him, just he and I, and one interpreter.”

Biden was sent to China in 2013 on a number of missions, including to persuade Xi to stop militarizing the South China Sea by building islands and putting bases on them.

He failed spectacularly.

Throughout his vice presidency, Biden steered America into a position of sycophancy with China, missing the strategic threat it posed to our interests and those of our allies, like Australia, Japan and Taiwan.

As a presidential candidate, he has not changed his tune. Last May, Biden declared China was “not competition” for the US.

It is willful blindness, at best, for a senior politician not to perceive the threat from China.

The fact that Biden’s son is embroiled in multimillion-dollar financial deals with Chinese state-owned enterprises suggests something more sinister may be afoot.

KIM!!!!!!