Editor’s note: What follows is an excerpt from Peter Schweizer’s new book “Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win.” It can be purchased here.
There are important reasons for Beijing to want their commercial ties with the Biden family to remain obscured.
The greater puzzle is, why would the Biden family want commercial ties to China? Could Hunter Biden not trade on his last name to open doors in less authoritarian countries?
Chinese officials have cultivated these commercial ties for more than a decade. Other Biden family members have happily pursued financial relationships, too, eager to cash in with lucrative deals. Since I first broke the story about these ties in 2018, I have gained access to an abundance of new documentary evidence.
In short, the new evidence makes clear that the Biden family received some $31 million from Chinese businessmen with very close ties to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence during and after Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president. Indeed, as of this writing, some of those financial relationships remain intact. One is struck by the extraordinary concentration of intelligence ties by the businesspeople making these deals with the Bidens. These ties reach the highest levels of Chinese intelligence, including the former head of the Ministry of State Security, the head of foreign intelligence recruitment for Chinese intelligence, and a cluster of United Front organizations used for intelligence operations in the West. (We will later learn of the significance of these United Front organizations—something Xi and other communist officials consider a “magic weapon” in their struggle against the West.)
The new sources of information also provide even more evidence that this is a story about not just Hunter Biden, but Joe Biden himself. To some degree, for the period our research covers, Hunter Biden and Joe Biden had intertwined finances. Hunter Biden privately complained to family members about paying his father’s bills. “I love all of you,” he wrote to his daughter Naomi on January 3, 2019. “But I don’t receive any respect and thats fine I guess -works for you apparently. I Hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family Fro 30 years. It’s really hard. But don’t worry unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary.”
Other correspondence confirms that the vice president of the United States, signified by the initials “JRB” for Joseph Robinette Biden, was mentioned in emails discussing payments or financial opportunities.
The idea that his father might be participating in Hunter Biden’s dealings was potentially realized when Hunter Biden or his business partner, Eric Schwerin, arranged for private phone lines for the vice president, at a cost ranging from $190 to several hundred dollars a month. This would allow for a non-official channel of communication. It is neither legal for the vice president of the United States to accept gifts from a company, nor clear why the vice president of the United States needs an undisclosed means of communication. According to Hunter, he (or Rosemont Seneca Partners) had been paying for multiple phone lines for his father for eleven years—all while he was in office as a senator or vice president. Using the lowest number of payments for “JRB,” we found that for the cost of Joe’s phone line(s) ($190), that amounts to over $25,000. Interestingly, in February 2017, Hunter moved to put at least one phone number back under Joe Biden’s name after he left office because, “he wants to start paying it.”
There are myriad other examples of communications between Hunter Biden and his partners at Rosemont about paying the bills of then vice president Joe Biden. These included paying for contractors making renovations on Joe Biden’s Delaware home. Schwerin wrote to Hunter in June 2010, asking him which ones “should get paid out of ‘my’ account and which should be put on hold or paid out of the ‘Wilmington Trust Social Security Check Account.’” In addition, Schwerin explains, “There is about $2,000 extra in ‘my’ account beyond what is used for monthly expenses.” In a follow-up email on June 8, Schwerin told Hunter that “Mike Christopher,” one of the contractors who worked on Joe Biden’s Delaware home, “is hassling” him. He said that he was “paying a couple of the smaller things since I haven’t heard from your Dad.” In yet another instance, Hunter made reimbursements to Joe Biden for a Ford Raptor truck, in an email marked “payment to JRB from RHB – autopay owasco acct.”
The new sources of information presented here include:
• The Hunter Biden Secret Service Travel Logs
The Secret Service keeps travel logs on the family members of the president and vice president when they travel with them. Hunter Biden’s Secret Service travel logs, covering the years from 2009 to 2014, were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and by the U.S. Senate Oversight Committee.
• The Bevan Cooney emails
This collection of more than twenty-five thousand emails contains the correspondence of Hunter Biden business associate Bevan Cooney between 2010 and 2016. Cooney’s emails show communication to and from Hunter Biden and include an abundance of attachments and documents. Cooney granted us access to his complete email collection.
• The United States Senate Oversight Committee Report
Issued in September 2020, the U.S. Senate committee report on Hunter Biden’s activities included dozens of U.S. Treasury Department Suspicious Activity Reports (SARS), which detailed some financial transactions of Hunter Biden and his firms. (Note: a supplement to the report was released in November 2020.)
• The Tony Bobulinski emails and messages
Bobulinski, a successful financier and businessman, was brought into the Biden orbit in 2017 to help put together and run
an investment fund that the Chinese would finance. Bobulinski shared those records with the U.S. Senate Oversight Committee.
• Jason Galanis materials
We were given access to materials involving Hunter Biden business partner Jason Galanis.
• The Hunter Biden emails from his laptop
These emails number close to twenty-five thousand and include emails and messages sent to colleagues, partners, and family members. Hunter Biden has never denied that the emails are genuine, even admitting that they could be his. Were the emails false, we could assume that he would vigorously challenge their authenticity. He has not.
As we first reported in Secret Empires, in 2009, Hunter Biden joined forces with his close friends and fellow Yale students Devon Archer and Christopher Heinz to set up a series of businesses. They first established Rosemont Capital and, soon after, Rosemont Seneca Partners. They also set up Rosemont Realty and Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners. Rather than locate the shop in Manhattan, the world’s financial capital, Rosemont Seneca leased space in Washington, D.C. “They occupied an all-brick building on Wisconsin Avenue . . . just two miles from both Joe Biden’s office in the White House and his residence at the Naval Observatory.”
Hunter Biden and his partners constructed a remarkable constellation of limited liability companies, many of which served as passthroughs, to manage the flow of foreign money. These included Oldaker, Biden, and Belair, LLP; Seneca Global Advisors; Rosemont Seneca Advisors; RSP Investments; Eudora; RSTP I; RSTP II Alpha and Bravo, Owasco, and Skaneateles. Numerous emails—including corporate documents—between the two clearly indicate that the management of those LLCs and Hunter Biden’s finances were handled by his colleague Eric Schwerin, a former Clinton administration official.
Hunter Biden’s defenders present a wholly benign narrative: he had a small role in medium-sized deals with profit-driven Chinese investors drawn in only by his business acumen. The facts add up to something else entirely.
From the book “RED-HANDED: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win” by Peter Schweizer. Copyright © 2022 by Peter Schweizer. Reprinted by permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.