Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, announced he’d be stepping down from the board of his Chinese-backed firm and vowed he wouldn’t engage in any business overseas if his father wins the presidency in 2020, even as he denied any wrongdoing.
Hunter Biden said that by the end of October he’d be resigning from his position on the board of BHR (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Company, a private equity firm established in 2013 with backing from Chinese state-owned financial companies with the goal of investing Chinese money and whose largest shareholder is the state-controlled Bank of China. The announcement on Sunday came through his lawyer, George Mesires, as first reported by Bloomberg.
Biden’s position with the Chinese-backed company has come under scrutiny in recent months as Joe Biden pursues the 2020 Democratic nomination. President Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and others have pointed to Hunter Biden’s position with the company — and to a trip he took to China with his father while he was still vice president — as a sign of corruption and nepotism. In December 2013, Hunter Biden flew with Joe Biden on Air Force Two to Beijing, China, where Joe Biden shook hands with Jonathan Li, a Chinese banker and Hunter Biden’s business associate.
“That’s probably why China for so many years has had a sweetheart deal where China rips off the U.S.A., for so many years they’ve been ripping off our country” because of politicians like “Biden where they give the son a billion and a half dollars,” Trump said earlier in October. “You know what they call that? They call that a payoff.”
Trump has also turned “Where’s Hunter?” into a campaign mantra at recent rallies.
“Hunter always understood that his father would be guided, entirely and unequivocally, by established U.S. policy, regardless of its effects on Hunter’s professional interests,” Hunter Biden’s statement on Sunday said. “He never anticipated the barrage of false charges against both him and his father by the President of the United States.”
Biden denied the claims from Trump that he made $1.5 billion after the China trip. Biden’s lawyer said Hunter didn’t have any equity in the company while Joe Biden was in office and said his position was unpaid. His lawyer said the firm now handles $2.1 billion in investments, and that Biden purchased 10% of the company for $420,000 after his father left office in 2017. His lawyer insisted that Biden hasn’t made a profit off the venture.
Biden’s work with BHR (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Company isn’t his only controversial connection to Chinese business. While working with multibillion dollar Chinese conglomerate CEFC China Energy’s leader Ye Jianming on a natural gas deal in the United States worth millions of dollars, he agreed to represent Jianming’s associate, Patrick Ho, who was eventually convicted by the Justice Department for bribing foreign governments. Jianming was reportedly detained in China.
The younger Biden also vowed on Sunday to avoid any work for foreign companies if his father wins in 2020. The statement said that “under a Biden Administration, Hunter will readily comply with any and all guidelines or standards a President Biden may issue to address purported conflicts of interest, or the appearance of such conflicts, including any restrictions related to overseas business interests” and that “he will continue to keep his father personally uninvolved in his business affairs.”
Biden also repeated his claim that he had never discussed his overseas business dealing with his father. When pressed on it this summer, Joe Biden also said he’d never spoken with Hunter Biden about any of his overseas ventures. This claims by the Bidens are at odds with an interview earlier this year with the New Yorker, however, during which Hunter Biden said he and his father discussed his role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, with Joe Biden saying, “I hope you know what you are doing” and Hunter Biden replying, “I do.”
“Despite extensive scrutiny, at no time has any law enforcement agency, either domestic or foreign, alleged that Hunter engaged in wrongdoing at any point during his five-year term,” Hunter Biden’s statement claimed.
The former vice president’s son claimed he’d been recruited to join Burisma by Aleksander Kwasniewski, Poland’s former president who also sat on the board, and that he was trying to help the company improve its “its corporate reform initiatives” and that “at no time was he in charge of the company’s legal affairs.” He stepped down from Burisma earlier this year.
For months, Giuliani urged Ukraine to investigate the Bidens over Hunter Biden’s $50,000 per month position with Burisma and because of Joe Biden’s actions in Ukraine threatening to withhold $1 billion in loans while pushing for Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin to be fired. The Biden camp and others have countered that Shokin was widely seen by the U.S. and Europe — and inside Ukraine — as ineffective in combating corruption. Ukraine’s Parliament removed Shokin in 2016.
Trump asked for a “favor” from Ukraine during a July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in investigating a conspiracy theory related to the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which determined the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee’s email systems, an assessment special counsel Robert Mueller agrees with. Trump also urged the Ukrainian leader to look into any Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election and talked about “the other thing,” suggesting the Ukrainians investigate allegations of corruption and the Bidens. Trump urged Zelensky to speak with Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr, but the Justice Department made it clear that Barr wasn’t associated with the effort.
