During his years in the Senate, Biden’s family benefited financially in various ways as he leveraged political power. Joe’s sister Valerie ran all of his senate campaigns, as well as his presidential runs in 1988 and 2008. But she was also a senior partner in a political messaging firm named Joe Slade White & Company; the only two executives listed at the firm were Joe Slade White and Valerie. The firm received large fees from the Biden campaigns that Valerie was running. Two and a half million dollars in consulting fees flowed to her firm from Citizens for Biden and Biden For President Inc. during the 2008 presidential bid alone. Keep in mind that Joe Slade White & Company worked for Biden campaigns over eighteen years.
When Barack Obama selected Joe Biden as his running mate in 2008, it boosted the Biden family fortunes to another level. Now suddenly there were opportunities on a global scale. The executive branch offered an abundance of power to leverage, and the value of the Biden family’s commercial deals, especially those of Hunter, James, and Frank, would skyrocket.
With the election of his father as vice president, Hunter Biden launched businesses fused to his father’s power that led him to lucrative deals with a rogue’s gallery of governments and oligarchs around the world. Sometimes he would hitch a prominent ride with his father aboard Air Force Two to visit a country where he was courting business. Other times, the deals would be done more discreetly. Always they involved foreign entities that appeared to be seeking something from his father. Often, the countries in question, including Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan, had highly corrupt political cultures. In short, Hunter Biden was not cutting business deals in Japan or Great Britain, where disclosure rules and corporate governance might require greater scrutiny. These were deals in the truly dark corners of the world. One of the best places to research the billion dollars deals that Hunter Biden was part of is the World Bank Data Indicator site.
In 2009, Hunter established a series of small investment vehicles with his friend and business partner Devon Archer. Biden and Archer had been at Yale University together. They launched Rosemont Seneca Partners in partnership with Rosemont Capital, an investment vehicle backed by the Heinz family. Chris Heinz, stepson of then-senator John Kerry, had been roommates with Archer at Yale. Clearly, this would be an extremely well-connected firm in Washington, D.C.
As recounted in the book, ‘Secret Empires’, on December 4, 2013, Hunter was riding on Air Force Two with his father to Beijing, China. For Vice President Joe Biden, effective diplomacy was about forming personal relationships with foreign leaders. “It all gets down to the conduct of foreign policy being personal.” The vice president had a series of important and tense meetings with Chinese officials on a variety of critical matters in the bilateral relationship. The trip coincided with an enormous financial deal that Hunter Biden’s firm, Rosemont Seneca, was arranging with the state-owned Bank of China. What Hunter did during the official visit to Beijing we cannot know for sure. Other than a few photo ops with his father, he was nowhere to be seen. After the publication of Secret Empires, Hunter Biden, through an attorney, claimed to ABC News that he did no business during his visit to Beijing aboard Air Force Two. However, a Beijing-based company representative later claimed that Hunter had introduced his Chinese business partner, Jonathan Li, to his father during the visit.
Approximately ten days after the Beijing trip, Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Partners finalized a deal with the Chinese government worth a whopping $1 billion. The deal was later expanded to $1.5 billion. As of February 2020, the fund’s website says its investments amount to more than $2 billion.
It is important to note that this deal was with the Chinese government—not with a Chinese company, which means that the Chinese government and the son of the vice president were now business partners.
What they created was a joint venture called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). The name reflected who was involved: the “RS” was a reference to Rosemont Seneca; the “T” was the Thornton Group, a small U.S. investment firm that did business in China. It was a very unusual arrangement: the most powerful financial institution in China, the Bank of China, was setting up a joint venture with Rosemont Seneca Partners. BHR touted its “unique Sino-U.S. shareholding structure” as well as the fact that it was backed by the Chinese government.
Hunter Biden actively cultivated these deals. He had visited China twice before, in 2010 and 2011, to meet with senior Chinese government officials in finance. But he had no background in China, and other than a very brief and unsuccessful attempt to run a hedge fund with his uncle, no background in private equity.
When the Chinese government’s BHR was established, Hunter Biden was given a slot on the board of directors—supposedly unpaid while his father was vice president. His actual compensation cannot be known; it is confidential.
Since the publication of Secret Empires in 2018, Hunter has claimed that he only received compensation from the Chinese after his father left the vice presidency in January 2017. That’s still $150,000,000 from a joint venture with a bank owned by the Communist Chinese government, a government that is ripping off American technology and trade secrets by the billions annually. He further claimed it came in the form of a 10 percent equity stake in the Bohai Harvest Financial Management Company. Whether his claim is accurate or not is impossible to know—it cannot be independently verified. Furthermore, he has misled reporters about the Chinese deal in the past. Even if his account is accurate—that his compensation was deferred—it does not really make a difference. Deferred compensation from a Chinese government entity is still direct compensation from a Chinese government entity. He has never explained why he got this great opportunity from them in the first place.
BHR, with Hunter Biden on the board of directors and Devon Archer as the vice chairman and Investment Committee member, engaged in a series of financial deals that served the strategic interests of Beijing. In one of their first deals, the firm took an ownership stake in China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGN), a nuclear energy company. The company was charged in 2016 with espionage against the United States. Also charged was an engineer who stole nuclear secrets from the United States. BHR also helped buy out the American precision machining company Henniges. They bought the company in a joint deal with Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), a military contractor owned by the Chinese government. Because Henniges’s technology has military application, and therefore national security implications, the deal had to be approved by an interagency committee made up of Obama-Biden administration officials. BHR also invested in military-related technology companies closer to home: they bought a stake in Face++, a major developer of facial recognition software commonly used in a phone application made by the Chinese government for surveillance of its own population.
BHR was the first of a series of business relationships that Hunter Biden established with the Chinese government or Chinese government–connected entities. Another Hunter Biden–linked firm called Rosemont Realty struck a deal with a Chinese government–connected company in 2014. Hunter was an advisor and the “cofounder” of the company, which owned commercial real estate properties around the United States.
Just as he had little or no background in private equity, Hunter also had no background in real estate. Rosemont Realty openly touted its ties to Vice President Joe Biden. In a Rosemont Realty company prospectus for investors watermarked “CONFIDENTIAL,” there was the “key consideration” that “Hunter Biden (son of Vice President Biden) is on the advisory board.”
Better yet, Rosemont Realty had other political connections beyond Hunter Biden.
Rosemont Realty was headed by Daniel Burrell, a Yale grad who had worked on the John Kerry 2004 presidential campaign. A major investor in Rosemont Realty was an entity called Rosemont Real Estate GP, LLC.58 Who exactly owns Rosemont Real Estate GP is unclear; however, in Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, the firm lists its address as that of the Heinz family office in Pittsburgh and shares a phone number with Rosemont Capital in New York City. At the time of Rosemont Realty’s arrangement with the Chinese firm, John Kerry, married to Heinz heir Teresa Heinz Kerry, was the U.S. secretary of state. Just about a year after the massive deal with the Chinese government’s Bohai Harvest, another Hunter Biden firm struck a pact with another Chinese government–linked firm called Gemini Investments. This deal involved a multibillion-dollar investment with Rosemont Realty.
Stay tuned for The Thirty-Year History of Joe Biden’s Corruption – Part III
You can also read The Thirty-Year History of Joe Biden’s Corruption – Part I