Trump calls for China to probe Bidens.
President Donald Trump on Thursday publicly encouraged China to investigate Democratic political rival Joe Biden, snubbing his nose at an impeachment inquiry into whether a similar, private appeal to another foreign government violated his oath of office.
Trump declared at the White House, “China should start an investigation into the Bidens.” He said he hadn’t previously asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to investigate the former vice president and his son Hunter, but it’s “certainly something we could start thinking about.”
By publicly egging on China, Trump was amplifying the message he’d delivered in private to the president of Ukraine. That message, revealed by a government whistle- blower, has spawned the impeachment investigation by the House. Trump, who has defended his contact with Ukraine as “perfect,” went further in expanding his request to China, a Communist world power that has much at stake in its relationship with the United States in an ongoing trade war.
The president and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have for days been raising suspicions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China, leaning heavily on the writings of conservative author Peter Schweizer. On Monday, Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called the allegation that Chinese government business gave Biden’s son $ 1.5 billion “totally groundless.”
Schweizer, who advanced corruption claims against Hillary Clinton before the 2016 presidential race, was the first to make claims about a $ 1.5 billion business deal in China. Schweizer said the deal with a subsidiary of the Bank of China came after Hunter Biden accompanied his father on a diplomatic flight to Beijing in December 2013, while the senior Biden was vice president.
Hunter Biden at the time was a co- founder of an investment firm, Rosemont Seneca. Less than two weeks after the China trip, he and other investors launched a separate investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST.
Bohai Harvest was also among a consortium of investors that, in 2016, announced plans to raise $ 950 million to invest in an Australian subsidiary of a Chinese coal mining firm, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records. Those records and the mining firm’s annual report do not show whether the investments were carried out.
No evidence has emerged of any illegal dealings by Hunter Biden or his father in Bohai Harvest’s business interests in China.
There is also no evidence that Hunter Biden solely pocketed $ 1.5 billion from the China investment cited by Schweizer. The figure appears to have come from a deal announced in 2014 in which Bohai Harvest and other foreign and Chinese private equity firms aimed to raise $ 1.5 billion to invest outside of China.
But that deal raised less than a third of that amount, according to George Mesires, a lawyer for Hunter Biden. And Hunter Biden was an unpaid director of Bohai Harvest at the time, Mesires said on the Politifact website.
The younger Biden made no earnings from his Bohai Harvest board role until October 2017, nine months after his father left the White House, Mesires said. He then acquired a 10% interest in Bohai Harvest. NBC News said that stake would be worth about $ 4.2 million. — The Associated Press