Firms run by the family of US President Joe Biden received $4.8 million in payments from Chinese business executives, according to a report in Washington Post, in a stunning new disclosure.
A review by Washington Post reveals key details with additional documents, confirming what has been widely reported about – the Biden family’s murky financial dealings with some Chinese executives.
Hunter Biden, the son of the US president, and his uncle were paid $4.8 million over the course of 14 months by CEFC China Energy, the report claims, citing government records, court documents, bank statements, and emails contained on a copy of a laptop hard drive that once belonged to Hunter.
Biden’s son received at least $3.79 million in payments from the Chinese energy conglomerate through consulting contracts, the report notes.
He also received a $1 million retainer to represent Patrick Ho, a CEFC official who was charged in connection with a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme in Chad and Uganda, it adds.
According to the report, it “illustrates the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service.”
The CEFC deal became one of the “most lucrative, if short-lived, foreign ventures” Hunter is known to have pursued, it adds.
Hunter also reportedly inked an agreement with Chinese energy executive Gongwen Dong to receive a one-time retainer payment of $500,000 besides a $100,000 monthly stipend to jointly pursue investments, according to the report.
The stories based on information found on Hunter’s laptop hard drive began to be published by The New York Post in September 2020.
According to The New York Post, the inability of social media users to share the Biden laptop story "helped swing the election to Biden."
The New York Times earlier this month also reported that emails recovered from the laptop had been "authenticated.”
The latest disclosure by the Washington Post comes after Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson claimed to have the receipts that connect Hunter with a firm tied to the Chinese government.
Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, told the Senate on Monday that the documents were proof that Hunter “used his father's position and name to enrich himself and his family.”
Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, shared images that showed a wire transfer of $100,000 in August 2017 from the state-controlled Chinese energy company CEFC through Wells Fargo Clearing Services that stated “further credit to Owasco”, a firm run by Hunter.
Meanwhile, former US President Donald Trump in a Tuesday interview called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to reveal any information he might have on Biden’s son, Hunter.
In an interview broadcast by Real America’s Voice Just the News show, Trump claimed that the wife of the mayor of Moscow had given US$3.5 million to Hunter.
That’s a lot of money,” he claimed. “She gave him US$3.5 million so now I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it.”
Hunter was in news recently after Russia claimed that he had funded secret biological weapons labs in Ukraine.
A diagram published by the Russian Defense Ministry on Thursday demonstrated American attempts to work on an “especially dangerous pathogen of anthrax.”
Titled “Coordination of Biological Laboratories and Scientific Research Centers of Ukraine and the US,” the diagram also featured George Soros and a tab representing the Democratic Party as the mastermind behind the attempts.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the information had been found in documents seized by their soldiers in Ukraine.
Last year, the junior Biden had opened up about his drug addiction and other scandals in a memoir.
The book chronicled the 51-year-old's struggle with substance abuse, personal scandals, unceremonious exit from the US military, and shady dealings in Ukraine and other countries.
“I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, D.C., and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles. I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig,” he wrote in the prologue of ‘Beautiful Things’.