I think we all know that Trump and his family have been profiting like crazy from the presidency in dozens of different ways, from influence peddling to straight up graft. It couldn't be more obvious.
The president’s personal attorney has convinced more Democrats to open an impeachment inquiry into his client. But Rudy Giuliani is already hinting at a new front in his questionable offensive against former Vice President Joe Biden’s son. And it’s a charge that Trump allies outside the White House have been pursuing for months.
A group of conservative activists closely aligned with the president—including former White House adviser Steve Bannon, conservative author Peter Schweizer, and anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney—are trying to spread dirt on Hunter Biden’s work in China. Their efforts have come as almost all of the national political attention is currently focused on Giuliani’s and President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government into investigating alleged corruption involving the former VP’s son who formerly sat on the board of an energy company in the country.
Giuliani himself has barely concealed his desire to see a second line of attack opened on the younger Biden over his involvement in an investment fund called Rosemont Seneca, which Biden ran with Christopher Heinz, the stepson of former secretary of state John Kerry. In his protracted interview last week with CNN host Chris Cuomo, Trump’s attorney said the word “China” more than a dozen times to draw attention to the matter. Giuliani and Trump have also talked about China as a liability for Biden and his son in recent conversations, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions.
Reached for comment on Monday afternoon, Giuliani said he couldn’t comment on his private conversation with President Trump, “except to say I’ve done nothing on China but repeat what others have reported but it really looks bad.”
“It’s arguably worse than Ukraine,” he added for good measure.
As with Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine, his supposed China controversy is rooted in the investigative work of Schweizer, a conservative journalist whose 2016 book, Clinton Cash, raised conflict of interest allegations surrounding Hillary Clinton and her family’s foundation that dogged the former secretary of state’s 2016 presidential bid.
Schweizer’s 2018 book, Secret Empires, sought to tie Rosemont’s investment activity to Vice President Biden’s senior government position. Giuliani has spotlighted a $1.5 billion private equity deal between Rosemont and the Bank of China in his allegations of corruption. That figure came directly from Schweizer, who reported that a Rosemont entity secured a $1.5 billion private equity deal with the bank a couple weeks after Hunter Biden traveled to Beijing with his father aboard Air Force Two in 2013.
On both fronts—Ukraine and China—Biden’s presidential campaign insists the attacks are scurrilous. In a memo to reporters on Monday, a campaign spokesman called the corruption allegations at the heart of the charge “a roundly debunked conspiracy theory” that “Trump and Giuliani have tried to manipulate the media into repeating.” Schweizer’s reporting laid out a conspicuous timeline, but didn’t establish any actual connection between the Bidens’ trip to China and Rosemont’s Bank of China-backed venture. Hunter Biden wasn’t even a Rosemont equity owner while his father served as vice president, according to his attorneys and he has said that he conducted no business while on that 2013 trip.
Nevertheless, Schweizer has called for additional government investigations into the Bank of China investment, as well as his business activities in Ukraine.
“Will the Senate investigate Joe and Hunter Biden’s actions in China and Ukraine? We don’t know, but they should,” Schweizer wrote in a May column in the New York Post.
That column ran about two weeks after a group of Trump allies assembled in New York for a conference on the economic threat posted to the U.S. by Beijing. The event was sponsored by a new group called the “Committee on the Present Danger: China,” which is led in part by Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, a right-wing foreign policy group that alleges Biden and his family have “profited handsomely” from “business-as-usual with Beijing.”