Election skulduggery must be probed
US Justice Dept will need to identify those behind project alleging Biden’s ties to China
A 64-page intelligence
In 2019, after former US vice-president Joe Biden announced he would run for the presidency in 2020, his opponents looked for ways of frustrating him. They saw his son, Hunter Biden, as his Achilles’ heel, particularly over his business dealings around the world. They were convinced that, if they dug deeply enough into his past, they could find things which would discredit Biden’s candidacy.
Among his business interests, Hunter has previously been a director of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, whose activities led to an investigation by the prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. Biden’s opponents alleged that, while vicepresident, he exerted pressure on Ukraine to fire Shokin, in order to kill the investigation. If true, this would clearly harm Biden, but it needed evidence. On Sept 25, 2019, therefore, when a White House memorandum was released of a July telephone call between US President Donald Trump and the new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, it revealed that the Bidens featured prominently, with Trump asking his counterpart to “look into” both men.
Trump said “there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great”.
As the US has strict prohibition over foreign involvement in its democratic processes, the revelations sparked outrage in Washington DC. It emerged that Zelensky had also been told that, if he did not play ball, military assistance to his country would be withheld.
The House Intelligence Committee’s chairman, Adam Schiff, described what had happened as “a classic mafia-like shakedown of a foreign leader”, and Trump was impeached for abuse of power. This, however, was ultimately voted down in the Senate, which his party controls, by 52 votes to 48.
Despite this fiasco, Trump supporters still regarded Hunter as fair game and they switched their attention to Hunter’s business dealings in China.
In 2015, when his father was still vice-president, Hunter joined the board of a China-based equity fund, BHR Partners, and later took a 10 percent stake. After his father’s opponents alleged that they had both been involved in financial malfeasance, Hunter took steps to clear the air. On Oct 23, 2019, his lawyer, George Mesires, said his client had taken up his “unpaid position” with BHR because of “his interest in seeking ways to bring Chinese capital to investment markets”. He explained that Hunter did not acquire his stake in BHR until 2017, by which time his father was out of office. Hunter resigned from BHR in April 2020 but kept his stake.
There matters rested, until September, when a 64-page intelligence document, the creation of a bogus intelligence firm “Typhoon Investigations”, was posted to an anonymous blog, “Intelligence Quarterly”, with links to an academic called Christopher Balding. It alleged that Hunter had political ties in China, while his business dealings there had “questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing”. The author presumably hoped this would compromise Joe Biden himself.
On Oct 22, seven weeks after its original publication, Balding posted the document on his blog, at which point far-right media outlets hailed it as evidence that Biden was beholden to China. The only problem was that the document was fake.
Indeed, its principal author, Marten Aspen, a Swiss security analyst, turned out to be non-existent, with his accompanying photograph having been artificially generated. When asked about this by the US media outlet NBC, Balding confirmed that Aspen had been created “solely for the purpose of releasing this report”.
Balding told NBC that the document had been “commissioned by Apple Daily”, the newspaper owned by Next Media founder Jimmy Lai Chee-ying. He said that he dealt mainly with Mark Simon, Lai’s righthand man, and the Apple Daily team in Taiwan.
On Oct 30, Apple Daily denied the allegation against it, although Lai, a China critic with close ties to the US government, said he was “sorry” that his newspaper had been implicated, insisting that he was not personally involved in commissioning the document. He accepted, however, that the Taiwan-based Simon had “worked with the project”, and that he “used my private company’s money to reimburse for the research he requested”, adding that “it’s only $10,000 so he didn’t have to have my approval”. Simon, meanwhile, announced his resignation, apologizing for having “allowed damage to Jimmy on a matter he was completely in the dark on”.
On Oct 31, Reuters reported that Apple Daily had been observing Hunter for some time. It recently published two articles about his ties to a Taiwan businessman whom it described as a purported broker
“enabling Hunter Biden’s deals (in the Chinese mainland) over a decade”. However, Apple Daily has stated that this story was undertaken by its investigative journalists in Taiwan and is unrelated to the 64-page document. If true, this begs the question of why there was a preoccupation with Hunter, particularly at a time when his father was seeking the presidency.
Lai appreciates the situation in which he finds himself, saying “it is hard for anyone to believe that I didn’t know about it and my integrity is damaged”. He has, of course, forged close ties with Washington DC, and, on his visit in July 2019, he enjoyed privileged access to both Vice-President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. On May 28, he announced that “Trump is the only person who can save us” from China, and suggested that Trump should freeze the US assets of Chinese government officials.
In the US, attempts to undermine the electoral process are taken very seriously indeed. So are organized efforts to damage candidates for office by making false allegations against them on the internet, which, at the very least, are libelous. The US Department of Justice will need to investigate this shocking instance of election-related skulduggery and identify who wrote the 64-page document and who was behind the project. It should then decide if there is evidence which establishes a criminal conspiracy.
document, the creation
of a bogus intelligence
firm “Typhoon
Investigations”,
alleged that Hunter
had political ties
in China, while his
business dealings there
had “questionable
authorship and
anonymous sourcing.