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Hunter Biden’s Foreign Dealings Spell More Trouble Ahead
Justice Department opens prospect of pursuing lobbying violations as it presses on with criminal tax probe, while Republicans push to implicate President Biden in his son’s activities
By James T. Areddy, Aug. 22, 2023
Hunter Biden accompanied his father on a trip to Beijing in 2013.\
U.S. relations with China were steady in December 2013 when then-Vice President Joe Biden stepped off Air Force Two in Beijing with a seemingly unremarkable companion: his son Hunter.
Days later, Shanghai authorities approved the formation of an investment boutique, underwritten by Chinese government money, that named Hunter Biden as a director and later cut him an ownership share at a discounted price. Roughly four months afterward, he began earning up to $1 million annually for sitting on a corporate board in Ukraine, a country his father paid special attention to as vice president. Hunter Biden would go on to earn millions more from a brief association with a Chinese energy-and-finance conglomerate trying to break into the U.S.
The younger Biden’s foreign business activities loom larger than ever a decade after that trip, with President Biden seeking re-election as a grinding Justice Department investigation and a determined probe by congressional Republicans scrutinize where Hunter Biden made money overseas and what he got paid to do.
Last month prosecutors told a judge that as they continue to investigate Hunter Biden’s activities, he faces the possibility of being prosecuted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires Americans who talk to U.S. government officials or the media on behalf of foreign parties to register that relationship. A review by The Wall Street Journal of the younger Biden’s business activities shows the areas where he interacted with foreign entities and received money from them.
No evidence has emerged to show President Biden benefited from his son’s international commercial endeavors, nor that he wielded government authority to favor them. And the president isn’t a target of the Justice Department investigation.
“Hunter Biden did not involve his father in, nor did his father assist him in, any of his business,” a spokeswoman for Hunter Biden’s legal team said.
Yet the political peril has grown. The president’s allies had been hopeful that a plea deal, centered on misdemeanor tax charges and an agreement to skirt a gun charge altogether, would squelch public interest in Hunter Biden. Instead, in late July, they saw that deal implode under questions from a judge.
This month the U.S. attorney who has led the investigation for five years, David Weiss, was named a special counsel, expanding his remit to pursue other charges against Hunter Biden.
A spokeswoman for Weiss declined to comment. Outlines of what could interest Weiss’s team emerged when the plea deal fizzled. Court filings signed by both sides pointed to Hunter Biden’s past tax delinquency and specified how in one year, 2017, roughly three quarters of the $2.95 million in money paid to him came from China, Ukraine and Romania interests. A person familiar with the finances said around a third of that amount was for associates, leaving Hunter Biden’s own income that year just shy of $2 million.
This article is based on interviews with past associates of Hunter Biden and executives of his commercial partners, as well as corporate, congressional and court documents.
For decades, the Biden family name has been associated with U.S. foreign policy. Interviews, emails and other communications reviewed by the Journal, some from Hunter Biden himself, suggest that cachet proved alluring to supplicants in China, Ukraine and elsewhere, who lavished millions of dollars on Hunter Biden before his father became president. His friend and former partner Devon Archer testified to a House panel last month that those people saw Hunter Biden’s apparent access in Washington as a “brand being delivered.”
Getting paid by foreigners isn’t a crime, even if one service they are seeking is proximity to power. In that regard, Hunter Biden’s activity mirrored that of other presidential relatives over the years. Based on what the Justice Department has made public, Hunter Biden faces legal trouble for how he failed to account for his business activity, not that he undertook it.
Under the now-defunct agreement Hunter Biden reached with federal prosecutors that last month broke apart, he admitted to failing to file tax returns or pay what he owed in 2017 and 2018, when he was addicted to crack cocaine. In 2021, an associate covered the younger Biden’s $1.9 million in outstanding taxes for those two years, including interest and penalties, the agreement said.
Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings dovetail with other lurid aspects of his background: He was earning and spending big money at a time when his personal life was in free fall. Salacious details of past drug use, shady business partners, exotic locations and a gun are documented by photos, emails and spreadsheets from Hunter Biden’s own laptop.
Congressional Republicans, hoping to retake the White House, have produced thick reports alleging money flows from overseas enriched Hunter Biden and other Biden family members. Their subpoenaed bank records have raised questions, such as why a politically connected Kazakh businessman wired Hunter Biden $142,300 for a Porsche in 2014, shortly after he met the vice president.
The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer (R., Ky.), has pressed on these and other points, citing testimony from two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers who said that the Justice Department sought to limit the probe into the younger Biden’s activities.
Testimony from Archer and other evidence have called into doubt the president’s assertions that he never spoke about business with his son. But even as some of President Biden’s political opponents have called for his impeachment based on foreign payments to his family members, they haven’t shown he had meaningful involvement in their moneymaking.
Hunter Biden, now 53 years old, was just 2 when his now 80-year-old father was first elected to the Senate, and he grew up in the public eye. The tightknit Biden family endured tragedies in the spotlight too, starting with the 1972 car crash that killed Hunter Biden’s mother and sister and badly injured Hunter Biden. The death from brain cancer of his brother Beau made national news in 2015, and Hunter Biden has written the despair exacerbated his drug use, contributing to his divorce two years later.
A Yale- and Georgetown-educated lawyer, Hunter Biden circled the globe as a director and chairman of the charity World Food Program USA while his father was vice president. The elder Biden was still in that office when the son pivoted to fundraising for real estate and other ventures, playing pitchman and leaving details to partners, who often shared Yale connections, including Archer.
“I traveled so much for my own consulting business and had contacts in places so wide-ranging that my elevator pitch to clients was that we could help build their portfolio ‘from Baltimore to Beijing,’” Hunter Biden wrote in his 2021 memoir.
His foreign interests principally involved two nations: China and Ukraine.
For around five years starting in early 2014, when his father was vice president, Hunter Biden served as a director of Ukraine gas producer Burisma, run by an oligarch who made no secret of his desire to appear close to Washington as a way to protect his interests at home. In Washington, Hunter Biden’s Burisma role sparked concerns that it reflected a double standard, as his father’s vice presidency featured a drive against corruption in Ukraine. In his recent testimony, Archer said, “I think Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the brand attached to it,” referring to the Biden name.
While Hunter Biden’s Ukraine earnings appeared largely based on his boardroom participation, a consulting firm hired by Burisma may have used his name in Washington in 2016, and it isn’t clear that Hunter Biden knew if it was doing so.
Hunter Biden served as a director of Ukraine gas producer Burisma for five years.
It isn’t clear whether such a situation would have required Hunter Biden himself to register as a lobbyist. The Justice Department has stepped up efforts to police that law in recent years, but has faced a string of related losses in court, amid disputes about what exactly counted as a foreign client and what work fell under the law.
Both Joe and Hunter Biden have denied any wrongdoing related to Burisma. Hunter Biden has said he displayed poor judgment in accepting the board seat.
How Hunter Biden earned money from China is opaque.
The China business harks back a decade, to the month the Bidens touched down in Beijing. Twelve days after their arrival, the younger Biden took a board seat on a newly established private-equity firm called Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management. He wasn’t paid, but the Journal has reported that after his father’s vice presidency ended, Hunter Biden bought 10% of the fund at a discounted price. He later stepped down and sold the share for virtually nothing, his legal team has said.
No money from BHR appears to figure in the government’s disclosures connected to the now-discarded plea deal last month. The fund underperformed but has been controversial because its shareholders included some of China’s biggest, government-managed financial giants, like Bank of China, and the financier who founded BHR, Jonathan Li, met the vice president during his two-day Beijing trip in 2013. “Just long enough to say hello and shake hands,” Hunter Biden said in his memoir. The book also said the BHR deal was settled before, not after, the China trip, which he described as an opportunity to catch up with his father.
Hunter Biden’s other China connection gets no mention in his book. But it has been a focal point of congressional investigations into his dealings and is identifiable in the signed Justice Department agreement with Hunter: a flash-in-the-pan Shanghai oil-and-finance conglomerate called CEFC China Energy and its free-spending chairman, Ye Jianming.
Text messages from his laptop and people familiar with the situation indicate Hunter Biden did personal favors for Ye Jianming, the chairman of the since-collapsed Chinese oil-and-finance conglomerate CEFC.
The Journal has reported links between Ye and China’s military and how he associated with a Who’s Who of famous names around the world, including retired politicians and their relatives. From Prague to Moscow and Bucharest, CEFC committed billions of dollars to energy and financial investments that appeared to reflect Beijing’s official priorities for expanding its global influence, and by 2017 the company had set its sights on U.S. opportunities.
“It seems that Ye was offering powerful people around the world financial incentives—bribes, essentially—to cooperate with CEFC,” according to Jeremy Garlick, an associate professor at Prague University of Economics and Business who has studied the company.
CEFC and Hunter Biden established various U.S. joint ventures, including some named Hudson West, according to business records and former executives. Text messages from his laptop and people familiar with the situation indicate Hunter did personal favors for Ye, who quickly spent over $80 million on New York residences, and for CEFC as it prowled for energy and financial companies to buy in Romania and elsewhere. At one point, Ye gave the younger Biden a large diamond.
Within 18 months, CEFC-linked entities had paid around $5 million to Hunter Biden, according to banking records produced by congressional Republicans.
Then Ye mysteriously disappeared and CEFC collapsed. China’s government has refused to characterize the unraveling of what it once celebrated as the nation’s biggest private energy business.
The company never discussed its links to Hunter Biden. His legal team’s spokesman said of his involvement with CEFC: “Hunter Biden was a private citizen with every right to pursue his own business endeavors.”
CEFC’s demise followed a Justice Department prosecution of a top CEFC representative for bribery in New York, in which the representative was later convicted. Hunter Biden’s now-defunct agreement with the government says that in March 2018, his law firm received $1 million for legal fees to assist the CEFC representative. The government said that would have been enough to settle his tax arrears.
