{"id":81375,"date":"2022-04-01T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-01T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=81375"},"modified":"2022-04-01T12:33:44","modified_gmt":"2022-04-01T17:33:44","slug":"hunter-the-mighty-nimrod","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=81375","title":{"rendered":"Hunter the Mighty Nimrod"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Yesterday we took a brief gander at China’s Belt and Road Initiative<\/a> (BRI), an infrastructure project<\/a> on a grand scale<\/a> meant to ensure China has access<\/a> to the natural resources it needs and to facilitate trade going the other way.

In a serendipitous development in the Hunter Biden saga, yesterday the Washington Post published a story<\/a> accepting as fact the reporting the New York Post did back in October 2020<\/a> based on the contents of a laptop that Hunter Biden left in a repair shop.

(This would be the same reporting the fools at Facebook and Twitter tried to stop<\/a> from spreading. In addition to the reporting the New York Post did, NY Post columnist Miranda Devine wove all the disparate threads into a coherent story of corruption in her book Laptop From Hell<\/em>.)

The initial reporting on the laptop focused on Hunter Biden’s involvement in Ukraine and his position on the board of Burisma even though he had no experience in Energy etc… That was not the extent of Hunter Biden’s money-grubbing, not by a long shot<\/a>. He was also chasing deals in China, and the Washington Post story focuses on the China angle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The deal was years in the making, the culmination of forging contacts, hosting dinners, of flights to and from China. But on Aug. 2, 2017, signatures were quickly affixed, one from Hunter Biden, the other from a Chinese executive named Gongwen Dong.<\/p>

Within days, a new Cathay Bank account was created. Within a week, millions of dollars started to change hands.<\/p>

Within a year, it would all begin to collapse.<\/p>

While many aspects of Hunter Biden\u2019s financial arrangement with CEFC China Energy have been previously reported and were included in a Republican-led Senate report from 2020, a Washington Post review confirmed many of the key details and found additional documents showing Biden family interactions with Chinese executives.<\/p>

Over the course of 14 months, the Chinese energy conglomerate and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle, according to government records, court documents and newly disclosed bank statements, as well as emails contained on a copy of a laptop hard drive that purportedly once belonged to Hunter Biden.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Of course, as the mention of the US Senate report points out, this was known some time ago<\/a>. And not surprisingly Devine knew of it too<\/a>. In this column<\/a>, she reported on the gift of a diamond this Chinese company CEFC and its founder Ye Jianming gave Hunter Biden, and in this column<\/a>, Tony Bobulinski, who was brought in to help manage the CEFC deal, put Joe Biden himself in the picture.

This also obliquely touches on our look at the BRI. Devine describes CEFC this way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHunter was great,\u201d Gilliar wrote to Walker. \u201cTrue sheikh of Washington.\u201d<\/p>

He emailed Hunter a few weeks later: \u201cIt has been made clear to me that CEFC wish to engage in further business relations with our group.\u201d<\/p>

Gilliar knew CEFC was the capitalist arm of President Xi\u2019s Belt and Road Initiative to spread China\u2019s influence \u2014 and debt traps \u2014 across the world. No Chinese company executed its goals more ardently than CEFC and its young chairman, who was dubbed the \u201cBelt and Road billionaire\u201d in the press.<\/p>

Chairman Ye had built his provincial energy company into a Fortune 500 colossus virtually overnight, an achievement described by Chinese news agency Caixin as \u201canother great enigma in the miraculous world of Chinese business.\u201d He enjoyed the support of President Xi and was former deputy secretary general of the government\u2019s propaganda arm, the China Association for International Friendly Contacts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The text of the US Senate report is here<\/a>. Of course, since it was done under the auspices of the Republicans who still controlled the Senate at the time, it was easily dismissed as simply dutiful lapdogs of Putin eagerly slurping up whatever sweet nectar their masters in Moscow put before them and passing it along.

The thread starts with this quote from the executive summary of that report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the Obama administration, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States approved a transaction that gave control over Henniges, an American maker of anti vibration technologies with military applications, to a Chinese government owned aviation company and a China based investment firm with established ties to the Chinese government. One of the companies involved in the Henniges transaction was a billion dollar private investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). BHR was formed in November 2013 by a merger between the Chinese government linked firm Bohai Capital and a company named Rosemont Seneca Partners. Rosemont Seneca was formed in 2009 by Hunter Biden, the son of then Vice President Joe Biden, by Chris Heinz, the stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, and others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n


At the beginning<\/a> of this relationship with CEFC Rosemont Seneca brought in the Thornton Group, a financial services firm familiar with Asia. The Senate report suggests the Thornton Group helped Hunter Biden get connected with Ye Jianming and the CEFC. And after that, deals with BHR began to develop.

The Senate report goes into some details, but the Washington Post story summarizes it this way…
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The contract, signed on Aug. 2, 2017, stated that Hunter Biden would get a one-time retainer of $500,000 and would then receive a monthly stipend of $100,000, with his uncle James Biden getting $65,000 a month.<\/p>

An unsigned copy of the agreement was found on the purported copy of Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop hard drive. A signed copy was included with bank records provided to Grassley and reviewed by The Post. Under the 26-page agreement, they agreed to jointly pursue investments under a company named Hudson West III LLC.<\/p>

The money began flowing almost immediately, with the first incoming wire of $5 million arriving on Aug. 8, 2017, according to documents found on the copy of Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop and corroborated by identical bank statements that Grassley\u2019s office obtained from Cathay Bank for an account jointly held by Hunter Biden and CEFC executives.<\/p>

After expenses and personnel costs, the bulk of the money, about $4.8 million, was directed over a 14-month period, usually in increments of $165,000, to an account linked to Hunter Biden, the documents show. During that time period, about $1.4 million was transferred from Hunter\u2019s account to the Lion Hall Group, the consulting firm that James Biden ran, according to other government records reviewed by The Post.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Again, Devine:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Less than two weeks after meeting Joe Biden, Bobulinski incorporated SinoHawk Holdings LLC, on May 15, 2017, having decided against Hunter\u2019s suggestion they call it CEFC America. It would be a global investment firm seeded with $10 million of Chinese money that would buy projects in the US and around the world \u201cin global and\/or domestic infrastructure, energy, financial services and other strategic sectors,\u201d said the contract he had drawn up.<\/p>

SinoHawk would be 50 percent owned by Ye Jianming, chairman of CEFC, through a Delaware-incorporated CEFC entity, Hudson West IV LLC. The other 50 percent would be owned by Oneida Holdings LLC, another Delaware firm set up by Bobulinski.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And, 10% of Oneida was meant for the “big guy”, who according to Bobulinski was Cornpop himself, Joe Biden.

The CEFC deal ultimately fell apart. Ye Jianming was purportedly arrested in China. I have no way of knowing if the arrest was real, if there was a behind the scenes power struggle over who would control these lucrative<\/a> energy contracts or if he was just taken out of the limelight for awhile.

Hunter Biden was not the lynchpin of China’s BRI efforts, but they were happy to slosh some dollars his way because of who his father is, and his father’s job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday we took a brief gander at China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an infrastructure project on a grand scale meant to ensure China has access to the natural resources it needs and to facilitate trade going the other way. In a serendipitous development in the Hunter Biden saga, yesterday the Washington Post published a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":273926,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/273926"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81375"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81409,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81375\/revisions\/81409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}