Hunter Biden received $260K from Beijing during dad’s campaign — with Joe’s address on wire: Comer
First son Hunter Biden received two wire transfers from Chinese nationals worth a total of $260,000 months after dad Joe began his 2020 presidential campaign — and with the elder Biden’s Delaware home listed as the beneficiary address, a key House Republican said Tuesday.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) revealed financial records that his panel subpoenaed turned up the transfers in July and August 2019.
The revelation is another blow to President Biden’s insistence that he had no knowledge or discussion of his only surviving son’s foreign business interests.
“Bank records don’t lie but President Joe Biden does. In 2020, Joe Biden told Americans that his family never received money from China,” Comer said in a statement.
“We’ve already proved that to be a lie earlier this year, and now we know that two wires originating from Beijing listed Joe Biden’s Wilmington home as the beneficiary address when he was running for president.”
Hunter Biden is known to have spent time living in father Joe’s Wilmington home following his 2017 divorce from wife Kathleen Buhle, even falsely claiming he owned the property on a July 2018 background check form as part of a rental application.
Hunter also listed his dad’s house as the billing address for his personal credit card and Apple account in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
However, both the first son’s memoir and proposed guilty plea agreement placed him in California with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, in the summer of 2019.
The two payments revealed Tuesday are linked to BHR Partners, a venture between Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca and Bohai Capital, a Chinese investment firm.
The first payment of $10,000 came from a person identified as Ms. Wang Xin on July 26, 2019. The second took place about a week later on Aug. 2, 2019, for $250,000 from Li Xiang Sheng, who goes by Jonathan Li.
Li is the CEO of BHR Partners and has long been considered a person of interest by Comer and congressional investigators.
“When Joe Biden was vice president, he spoke on the phone and had coffee with Jonathan Li in Beijing, and later wrote a college letter of recommendation for his children,” Comer noted, citing testimony by Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer.
White House officials fired back at Comer, arguing that the full context of the situation paints a different picture.
They stressed the “off and on” nature of Hunter’s time at his parent’s residence as he battled drug addiction and mental health struggles.
“Imagine them arguing that, if someone stayed at their parents’ house during the pandemic, listed it as their permanent address for work, and got a paycheck, the parents somehow also worked for the employer,” spokesman Ian Sams posted on social media. “It’s bananas. Yet this is what extreme House Republicans have sunken to.”
Hunter’s lawyer Abbe Lowell argued this was another instance in which Republicans “twist the truth to mislead people to promote their fantasy political agenda.”
“This was a documented loan (not a distribution or pay-out) that was wired from a private individual to his new bank account which listed the address on his driver’s license, his parents’ address, because it was his only permanent address at the time,” Lowell told CNN in a statement.
Archer told investigators that Hunter Biden introduced Li to his father, then vice president, in late 2013 during an official trip to Beijing. Archer also said that the now-first son put his father on speakerphone during a later meeting with Li.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Hunter Biden’s “paid-in capital” to establish the company was $425,000, according to corporate registration records.
Throughout 2021, then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Hunter Biden was working to “unwind” his 10% stake in BHR.
BHR Partners says it manages $2.1 billion in assets and has taken a prominent role in Chinese state-backed companies acquiring investments overseas.
“Joe Biden’s abuse of public office for his family’s financial gain threatens our national security. What did the Bidens do with this money from Beijing?” the Kentucky Republican went on.
Hunter Biden notes in his 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things,” that he was living in California at the time the wire transfer was made, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Ky.) told reporters Tuesday, adding that the latest findings are an example of the president having “lied to Americans again” and that it is “wrong” for him to say that he never received money from China.
Comer, likewise, told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that he’s “pretty certain” Hunter Biden was not living in his father’s Delaware home when the address was listed on the transfer.
“There is a relationship that was developed between Joe Biden and Jonathan Lee,” Comer charged.
“One thing that we all agree on is that China’s a threat to the United States. And here we have more evidence of the Biden family receiving millions and millions of dollars from our adversarial country for who knows what,” he added. “The Biden’s never have said what they did to receive the money. What did Hunter Biden do to receive a quarter of a million dollars from a Chinese national affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?”
On Sept. 12, McCarthy directed the Oversight, Ways and Means, and Judiciary committees to commence an impeachment inquiry.
The first Oversight panel hearing in the impeachment probe is slated for Thursday morning.
Lawmakers will hear from a handful of witnesses such as forensic accounting expert Bruce Dubinsky, former Justice Department official Eileen O’Connor, and George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley.
