Forget Ukraine and Hunter Biden. There’s another story we should be paying attention to and the best part is that Hunter has admitted to it, which just raises more questions.
Via an interview he gave to the New Yorker and published in July, what’s the deal with the giant diamond he received from a wealthy Chinese businessman? Did he pay taxes on it as income?
Someone please ask Joe Biden if his son paid taxes on the giant diamond he received from the Chinese businessman. pic.twitter.com/zmPvT5Lbyr
— Greg Pollowitz (@GPollowitz) September 21, 2019
From the New Yorker. This happened in 2017 and Hunter says it’s not a big deal because Joe Biden wasn’t in office:
One of Kathleen’s motions contains a reference to “a large diamond” that had come into Hunter’s possession. The motion seems to imply that it was one of Hunter’s “personal indulgences.” When I asked him about it, he told me that he had been given the diamond by the Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming, who was trying to make connections in Washington among prominent Democrats and Republicans, and whom he had met in the middle of the divorce. Hunter told me that two associates accompanied him to his first meeting with Ye, in Miami, and that they surprised him by giving Ye a magnum of rare vintage Scotch worth thousands of dollars.
Hunter claims he gave the $80,000 diamond to his associates:
Hunter was on the board of the World Food Program USA, a nonprofit that generates support for the U.N. World Food Programme, and he had hoped that Ye would make a large aid donation. At dinner that night, they discussed the donation, and then the conversation turned to business opportunities. Hunter offered to use his contacts to help identify investment opportunities for Ye’s company, CEFC China Energy, in liquefied-natural-gas projects in the United States. After the dinner, Ye sent a 2.8-carat diamond to Hunter’s hotel room with a card thanking him for their meeting. “I was, like, Oh, my God,” Hunter said. (In Kathleen’s court motion, the diamond is estimated to be worth eighty thousand dollars. Hunter said he believes the value is closer to ten thousand.) When I asked him if he thought the diamond was intended as a bribe, he said no: “What would they be bribing me for? My dad wasn’t in office.” Hunter said that he gave the diamond to his associates, and doesn’t know what they did with it. “I knew it wasn’t a good idea to take it. I just felt like it was weird,” he said.
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Ye then introduced Hunter to Patrick Ho who was later sentenced to three years in prison “for his role in a multiyear, multimillion-dollar scheme to bribe top government officials in Chad and Uganda”:
In the summer of 2017, Ye talked with Hunter about his concern that U.S. law-enforcement agencies were investigating one of his associates, Patrick Ho. Hunter, who sometimes works as a private lawyer, agreed to represent Ho, and tried to figure out whether Ho was in legal jeopardy in the U.S. That November, just after Ye and Hunter agreed on the Monkey Island deal, U.S. authorities detained Ho at the airport. He was later sentenced to three years in prison for his role in a multiyear, multimillion-dollar scheme to bribe top government officials in Chad and Uganda in exchange for business advantages for CEFC. In February, 2018, Ye was detained by Chinese authorities, reportedly as part of an anti-corruption investigation, and the deal with Hunter fell through. Hunter said that he did not consider Ye to be a “shady character at all,” and characterized the outcome as “bad luck.”
The whole New Yorker interview is worth a read. It’s got everything, including a crack pipe left in a rental car, Hunter’s romantic relationship with his brother’s widow and a new tattoo that reads, “shalom.”
When I asked him about it, Hunter Biden told me that he had been given the diamond by the Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming, who was trying to make connections in Washington among prominent Democrats and Republicans.https://t.co/X9dIKxkMcO
— Robert Faturechi (@RobertFaturechi) July 1, 2019
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