Joe Biden betrays at least a guilty knowledge of one of his son’s most lucrative Chinese business deals, in a new voicemail unearthed from Hunter’s abandoned laptop.
The president’s own words put the lie to his repeated insistence that he knew nothing about Hunter’s overseas business dealings.
“I think you’re clear”, says Joe in the Dec. 12, 2018, voicemail, referring to a New York Times story about the arrest of one of Hunter’s Chinese business partners, Patrick Ho, on bribery charges.
“I thought the article released online, it’s going to be printed tomorrow in the [New York] Times, was good.”
You’re only “clear” if you were in trouble beforehand. What was the trouble?
The trouble was that Ho’s first call after his arrest at JFK Airport was to Joe’s brother Jim Biden, Hunter’s uncle, and the Times was onto the story.
Ho had called Jim to try to track down Hunter, who he had paid a whopping $1 million legal retainer for just this circumstance. Easy money, since there is no evidence that Hunter did much legal work for Ho, apart from calling in another attorney.
Ho worked for CEFC, the Chinese energy company with which Hunter, Joe, Jim and partners entered a multi-million-dollar joint partnership.
Joe was slated to get “10 percent for the Big Guy” from the deal, according to an email on the laptop.
In 2017 CEFC brokered China’s biggest ever investment in Russia, a $9 billion acquisition of the Russian state oil giant Rosneft that would have signaled a tectonic shift in geopolitical power. The deal fell through after Ho’s arrest later that year.
Text messages on his laptop show Hunter panicking when the Times started asking questions about Ho’s involvement with the Bidens.
This rare media interest in their business affairs was a source of intense angst after Hunter was first tipped off to the Times story in July, 2018. All summer, he accused friends of leaking to the newspaper.
Other text messages show lawyer George Mesires boasting to Hunter that he was helping Times reporter David Barboza steer clear of Hunter and Joe’s involvement with CEFC.
“Barboza said that there is ‘very little about Hunter’” in the story, Mesires texts Hunter. “No reference to Joe Biden specifically relative to CEFC’s efforts.”
After the story is published Hunter praises Mesires: “You did an incredible job of keeping this basically to a big fat nothing.”
Mesires replies: “At the end of the day, I think people jadedly say, ‘this is how the world works.’”
That is the hope of the Bidens, that Americans will shrug off mounting evidence of their wrongdoing.