Biden got pass at debate on ties with China, Ukraine and his son

by WorldTribune Staff, June 28, 2019

Joe Biden has been under pressure for weeks to explain major corruption issues involving China, Ukraine and his son Hunter. But in the 2020 Democratic presidential debate on June 27, the former vice president faced no such pressure from the moderators.

Not a single question during the two-hour debate was posed to Biden, who is the Democratic frontrunner in most polls, addressed the scandals involving China, Ukraine and his son which were detailed by Peter Schweizer, Government Accountability Institute president, in his new book “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends”.

Gets a pass: Former Vice President Joe Biden

Critics on both the left and the right have asked Biden to explain the ties his son has to Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), a private equity firm upon whose board Hunter Biden sits. The company has received more than $1.5 billion in funding from groups associated with the communist government of the China, as reported in Schweizer’s book.

“In December of 2013, Vice President Joe Biden flies to Asia for a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a visit to Beijing, China,” Schweizer said in a March 2018 interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight.

Related: Joe Biden’s additional problems: Ukraine, China and his son, April 3, 2019

“To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They basically have said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese approval. We are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely criticized on that trip for going soft on China. So basically, no challenging them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.”

Schweizer continued: “Well, I think the reason he goes soft on China is because with him on that trip, flying on Air Force Two, is his son Hunter Biden, and ten days after they return from China, Hunter Biden — who has this small firm, he has no background in private equity, he has no background in Chinese finance — gets a whopping $1.5 billion deal from the Chinese government. This is the Chinese government giving Joe Biden and a [John] Kerry confidante the management over this money, and they made huge fees off of this money, and it’s an example of this kind of corruption. That’s the first of three major deals that the Chinese government does with people who are either the children — that is the sons — or close aides to Vice President Biden or Secretary of State John Kerry.”

The former vice president has refrained from commenting on Schweizer’s findings on the campaign trail.

He has not refrained from discussing U.S. foreign policy in relation to China.

At a recent event in Iowa, Biden claimed China was not a threat to the American worker.

“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” Biden said. “They can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the East. I mean in the West.

“They can’t figure out how they are going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks,” he said. “But guess what: they’re not competition for us.”

Biden’s role in the firing of Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in 2016 could also prove to be a major issue for the former vice president.

Last year, during a Council on Foreign Relations event, Biden told the audience that he pressed President Petro Poroshenko to fire Shokin, including threatening to withdraw a $1 billion U.S. loan from Ukraine, which had been economically decimated due to its war with Russian forces since 2014.

“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’ ” Biden said he told Poroshenko.

“Well, son of a b—-, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden added.

Shokin had been working on a corruption probe that implicated the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, a company that employed Hunter Biden, as a board member, The Hill reported.

Shokin told The Hill that he had made “specific plans” for the probe, including “interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”

The investigation ended shortly after Shokin was fired, and no charges were filed against any individuals of the company.


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