New York Post

How to stage a Hunter coverup

- Miranda Devine mdevine@nypost.com

FUGITIVE Gal Luft, the “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigat­ion, has made fresh allegation­s about the president’s family’s China connection­s in an exclusive 50-page exposé obtained by The Post.

The former Israel Defense Forces lieutenant colonel, who worked with the same Chinese energy company, CEFC, that paid Hunter and Jim Biden more than $8 million, skipped bail in Cyprus last year after being charged with attempted gun-running, acting as a foreign agent for China and lying to the FBI.

While his attacks on federal prosecutor­s clearly are self-serving, his disclosure­s so far have proven accurate, and his ongoing conversati­ons with former employees of CEFC while on the run have produced new informatio­n about how influentia­l Americans on both sides of the aisle in Washington were recruited to serve China’s imperialis­t Belt and Road Initiative.

Hunter Biden, “the true sheikh of Washington,” as one of his partners dubbed him, wasn’t the only VIP cultivated by CEFC’s enigmatic billionair­e chairman Ye Jianming, who sprinkled expensive diamonds around Washington like candy.

US intelligen­ce web

An energy expert with deep intelligen­ce ties in Washington and Beijing, Luft claims “three former national security advisors, a former CIA Director, a former NSA Director, a former Chairman of the Fed, former cabinet secretarie­s, former senators, retired generals, CEOs [acted as] CEFC’s enablers in Washington [and] were willing to go to great lengths to enrich themselves by parking under Ye’s gown.”

Chairman Ye, Hunter’s most lucrative Chinese business partner, has not been seen since he was arrested for “economic crimes” in China in early 2018, on the direct orders of President Xi Jinping, according to Chinese news agency Caixin.

The mystery is why he wasn’t arrested before he left the US.

Luft says that Ye was tipped off by an FBI mole that CEFC was under investigat­ion. He reveals that Ye believed he was being followed by the FBI in the winter of 2017 whenever he left his $50 million Upper West Side penthouse, including through Central Park, after his deputy, Patrick Ho, was arrested on bribery charges at JFK Airport.

Although prosecutor­s from the Southern District of New York produced evidence during Ho’s trial that Ye was the mastermind of the scheme to bribe African leaders at the UN, they never charged the CEFC chairman. He was allowed to roam free around Manhattan for weeks after Ho’s arrest.

The FBI did try to stop Ye leaving the country from a New Jersey airport just before Christmas 2017 on his $60 million private jet, an A319 Airbus with tail number VPCIA. But Ye’s high-powered lawyers from Skadden, Arps intervened, successful­ly arguing that “there was no arrest warrant against him and thus no grounds for his detention,” claims Luft.

In March 2019, one month before Joe Biden announced he was running for president and nine months before the FBI took possession of his wayward son’s abandoned laptop, Luft went to the DOJ and told them about the millions of dollars CEFC was paying Hunter and his uncle Jim Biden.

He told them Joe had attended a meeting with Hunter and CEFC executives at a Four Seasons hotel in Washington, DC, at around the time that Hunter received a “multimilli­on dollar payment” from CEFC.

The Four Seasons meeting with Joe in February 2017 was confirmed by Hunter’s former business partner Rob Walker in a 2020 interview with the FBI and again in congressio­nal testimony this year.

Luft also warned the FBI in Brussels that it had a mole in its midst who had tipped off CEFC executives that they were under investigat­ion. He believed the mole was either a current or former FBI employee who was paid a lot of money to leak the contents of four sealed indictment­s from the Southern District of New York.

His disclosure­s about the Bidens were corroborat­ed substantia­lly by the FBI nine months later, when the bureau subpoenaed Hunter’s laptop, and then again last year by IRS whistleblo­wers who had been investigat­ing Hunter in Delaware since 2018.

“I have been able to corroborat­e informatio­n provided [by Luft to the FBI] to include the meeting between [Hunter] and the Chairman [Ye] in Miami and the reference to $10 million,” IRS supervisor­y agent Joe Ziegler testified to the House Ways and Means Committee, “the amounts of the wires from CEFC China Energy paid to [Hunter] . . . and the amounts of the monthly payments [Hunter] and [Jim] Biden would receive from CEFC China.”

Luft describes himself as “patient zero of the Hunter Biden investigat­ion [and] a key witness to a national security breach.” Yet his warnings went unheeded.

He points out that he was not charged with making false statements in Brussels about the Bidens, “which implies that on the issues of the Bidens and the arrest warrants leak the DOJ believed I was telling the truth.”

Pre-midterms indict

The false statement charges relate to his answers about his own dealings with CEFC, through a think tank that held energy conference­s with a CEFC think tank, run by Ho.

“Only later, when its coverup was about to be blown, the DOJ decided to impugn my credibilit­y by charging me with two counts of making false statements which they manufactur­ed in Brussels. If the government charges you with making a false statement, it means you are a liar. Nothing you say to then can be taken seriously, right?”

He questions the timing of his indictment, one week before the 2022 midterm elections that delivered Republican­s the House majority and subpoena power to investigat­e Biden corruption. He also points out that IRS investigat­ors Ziegler and Gary Shapley had signaled their intention to blow the whistle on DOJ slow-walking and obstructio­n of the Hunter investigat­ion.

“The DOJ knew it was only a matter of time before informatio­n about the Brussels meeting would reach Congress and their coverup would be blown. I was a loose nuke which could explode at any moment. I had to be defused.”

The president’s praetorian guard among Democrats and the media dismiss Luft as a “Chinese spy” and “discredite­d witness,” ignoring the damning mountain of evidence about Biden corruption uncovered by the impeachmen­t inquiry that goes far beyond the word of any single witness. Luft’s fugitive status had ruled him out as a witness, anyway.

But, as with Watergate, the coverup has become the bigger scandal, and that will take longer to expose.

 ?? ??
 ?? ?? EXPLOSIVE EXPOSÉ: Fugitive “missing witness” Gal Luft (inset) warns of collusion at the highest levels to scuttle fed prosecutor­s’ probe of Hunter Biden.
EXPLOSIVE EXPOSÉ: Fugitive “missing witness” Gal Luft (inset) warns of collusion at the highest levels to scuttle fed prosecutor­s’ probe of Hunter Biden.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States