Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand lies.
Such is the case with the belated release of official photos of a 2013 visit to China by then-Vice President Joe Biden, accompanied by—whaddya know!—his son Hunter. In several photos, Hunter is shown meeting with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and in another he’s seen shaking hands with China’s then-vice president, Li Yuanchao. In other pictures, Hunter’s dad shakes hands with Jonathan Li, the CEO of a Chinese firm seeking to acquire energy companies across the world. Shortly after the trip, the Chinese government approved the license to create Li’s company, BHR Partners, in which Hunter would eventually acquire a 10 percent stake.
BHR Partners is primarily funded by Chinese nationals and entities, including the country’s primary investment bank. Between 2013 and 2019, it invested $2.5 billion in energy and other ventures across the world, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal. Hunter held on to his 10 percent stake in BHR through at least 2017. He said he eventually relinquished his stake to the entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris, perhaps as a means to repay the millions of dollars in loans Morris had made to Hunter over the years.
The details of this buckraking scheme were unearthed thanks to the Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the dogged reporting of the New York Post, which broke the first stories on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election.
It was in 2019, during former president Donald Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, that Hunter’s business in China first became a national story. At the time, Congressional Democrats were probing Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine to investigate Hunter’s lobbying on behalf of a Ukrainian energy company. Trump then floated the notion that Hunter was not only corrupted by Ukrainian interests, but Chinese interests as well. In response, Joe Biden flatly denied ever meeting with his son’s many business associates or even speaking with Hunter about these matters. He’s repeatedly made that statement ever since.
In March 2024, when confronted on the White House lawn about the House impeachment committee’s findings into his interactions with Biden family business associates, Biden said, “I did not interact with their partners.”
Really?