https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/the-chicanery-of-the-hunter-biden-plea-bargain/
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Remember Hunter Biden’s extortionate WhatsApp message to his Chinese business associate, Henry Zhao? The message we just learned about in June because Gary Shapley, an IRS whistleblower agent, shone a light on it? The message that spun up Congress and
much of the public, and even stirred the press out of its slumber for a moment or two, because it undeniably implicated President Biden?
Well guess whom the message failed to stir? That would be none other than newly minted “special counsel” David Weiss, the prosecutor who has supposedly been investigating Hunter Biden — and thus the Biden family influence-peddling business, the
main source of income for the president’s son — since 2018. Weiss, of course, is the Delaware U.S. attorney. Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland never tires of pointing out that he is a Trump appointee, but Weiss was confirmed and appointed in
Democrat-dominated Delaware only because of strong support by the state’s two Democratic senators, Biden allies Chris Coons and Tom Carper.
Initially, Weiss used the pendency of the 2020 election as an excuse to take no meaningful action on the investigation. Once Joe Biden won the presidency and installed Weiss’s boss, Garland, at the Justice Department helm, Weiss dutifully buried the
Biden investigation by not seeking an indictment from the grand jury. As every prosecutor knows, the statutory time-limit for filing criminal charges (known as the statute of limitations) runs out if charges are not formally filed. If a prosecutor drags
his feet for years, crimes that have not been charged become time-barred — i.e., no longer prosecutable.
Let’s review the WhatsApp message. Here’s Hunter writing Zhao:
I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from
anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting
here waiting for the call with my father.
Hunter Biden’s threatening message involved his business partners at CEFC, the now-defunct conglomerate that Biden family confidant James Gillar described as “the capital arm of ‘one belt one road.’” One Belt One Road is the initiative by which
the monstrous Chinese Communist regime — also known as the Bidens’ business partner — spreads its mercantilist tentacles around the world. As we’ve detailed, CEFC was also, and essentially, a Chinese government-intelligence operation that clearly
targeted Joe Biden and paid millions of dollars to the Biden family for an association with him — using Hunter as their entrée.
Let’s review the cast of characters with whom Hunter — in harmony with his dad — was playing hardball in the WhatsApp message. Henry Zhao was the CCP-connected general secretary of China’s Harvest Fund, which was part owner, with Hunter and
others, of Bohai Harvest RST Partners. (As I recently detailed, Hunter appears to have transferred his valuable 10-percent stake in that venture to Kevin Morris, the Hollywood lawyer who paid Hunter’s millions in delinquent taxes.) The “Zhang”
Hunter mentioned appears to be CEFC executive director Zhang Jianjun (a CCP heavyweight who, as Jerry Dunleavy reported in the Washington Examiner, accompanied the regime’s president, Xi Jinping, to a 2017 meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow as China
sought a stake in Russia’s state-owned energy giant, Rosneft.) The “chairman” appears to refer to Ye Jianming, the CEFC chairman and former Xi protégé, who (as the New York Post’s Miranda Divine reports) began the business relationship with
Hunter in 2015, while his father was vice president. Ye “gifted” Hunter a 3.16-carat diamond (worth $80K) to seal the deal. Xi’s regime then “disappeared” him in China in 2018, shortly after it was revealed in the trial of another CEFC
executive, Patrick Ho, that U.S. counterintelligence agencies had been conducting surveillance on CEFC players. (Hunter has a law degree but is not a criminal-defense specialist; yet, he had nevertheless been paid $1 million to “represent” Ho, whom
he described as “the f***ing spy chief of China” — at least until Ho got indicted for foreign corruption and thus had to get an actual defense lawyer.)
There’s been a lot of speculation about whether Joe Biden really was sitting with Hunter when this WhatsApp message was sent. While the president has denied it (just as he has incredibly denied all connection to the family business, even though access
to Joe Biden is the business), photographs on the laptop confirm that Hunter was at his father’s home on the day the message was sent. But whether Joe was physically there or not is beside the point. The ability to invoke the name of the guy with the
power — convincingly, since Joe often met and otherwise communicated with “Hunter’s” partners — is what made the business so profitable.
But let’s cut to the commonsense chase: Read the WhatsApp message, think about the shark tank the now-president’s slacker son was swimming in, and ask yourself if Hunter would dare to threaten Xi Jinping’s gang unless both he and they knew who the
main Biden in the equation was.
Hunter elaborated in the message to Zhao:
Z — Please have the director call me — not James or Tony or Jim — have him call me tonight.
Investigators believe Hunter was instructing Zhao that, given the urgency of the matter, CEFC director Zhang Jianjun was to call Hunter himself (putatively sitting there with Joe); he was not to call one of Hunter’s business-partner buffers — James
Gilliar (who handled a number of foreign payments for the Bidens), Tony Bobulinski (the investor recruited by Gilliar to build a business structure for the Bidens’ CEFC project, and who recalls having two face-to-face meetings with Joe Biden about it),
and Jim Bulger (of the Bulger family, a Boston Democratic Party powerhouse, and the Thornton Group, another partner in the lucrative Bohai Harvest investment fund that Hunter had established with the Chinese regime after flying to Beijing on Air Force 2
with the then vice-president).
Hunter further admonished Zhao:
All too often people mistake kindness for weakness — and all too often I am standing over top of them saying I warned you. From this moment until whenever he reaches me. It is 9:45 AM here and I assume 9:45 PM there so his night is running out.
Zhao responded, telling Hunter he would call him on WhatsApp.
Hunter ominously replied:
OK my friend — I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father. I sure hope whatever it is you are doing is very very very important.
Zhao got back to Hunter, reporting that Zhang had not answered Zhao’s call, “but he got the message you just mentioned.”
Boy, did he ever! The next day, Hunter got in touch with Gongwen “Kevin” Dong, whom he has described as his CEFC partner in the United States and an “emissary” of Chairman Ye. Three days later, an LLC known as “Hudson West III” began
establishing checking accounts. As further detailed in an analysis of bank records in a report compiled three years ago by Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), Hudson West III was controlled by Hunter Biden (through his
Washington law firm, Owasco PC) and Gongwen Dong.
The following day, CEFC Infrastructure Investment LLC, a U.S.-based CEFC subsidiary that listed Gongwen Dong as its director, sent Hunter Biden’s Owasco firm a payment of $100,000.
That was just an appetizer. Four days later, the same CEFC Infrastructure Investment LLC wired $5 million to Hudson West III. Over the next seven weeks, almost all of that $5 million ($4,790,375.25) was gradually transferred from Hudson West III to
Hunter’s Owasco firm.
It’s a remarkable series of events: An extortionate message obviously demanding payment, sent via an end-to-end encrypted service to ensure that it would not be deciphered except by the recipient, followed by over $5 million in money transfers, which
just happen to conform to the Biden pattern that House investigators have uncovered — a web of business entities to obscure where the money is coming from and where it’s going, with big transfers parsed into smaller installment payments likely to
draw less attention.
No wonder investigators were so interested. Yet, U.S. attorney Weiss’s office refused to allow agents to subpoena location data to determine where participants in the relevant messages were when they were communicating. Though the WhatsApp messages
illustrated that IRS agents should seek a judicial search warrant for the guest house at the Bidens’ Wilmington residence where Hunter was living, and Weiss’s subordinate conceded that there was probable cause, the agents were denied permission to
apply for the warrant. The stymied IRS investigators were told that Weiss’s office could not approve such a search-warrant application because the “optics” would be bad — by the same Weiss subordinate who later directed them not to ask questions
about “the big guy” or “dad” that might yield evidence of Joe Biden’s participation in the scheme.
Why rehash all of this on the occasion of Weiss’s first week under the sham designation of “special counsel” in the investigation he has been sabotaging for years?
Well, today’s being August 14, 2023, I thought I might remind you that the statute of limitations for most federal crimes is five years, and for tax felonies relevant to the Biden probe it is six years.
Despite the evidence accumulated over the last five years, David Weiss never filed an indictment. That means the statute of limitations clock has continued to tick . . . tick . . . tick. As a result, all potential tax crimes committed before August 14,
2017, are time-barred as of today; so are all other potential felonies committed before August 14, 2018, (e.g., extortion, bribery, money-laundering, failure to register as a foreign agent, and so on).
So I thought I’d mention that Hunter’s WhatsApp message happened on July 30, 2017. The $100,000 payment that soon rolled in was on August 4, 2017. The $5 million that followed landed on August 8, 2017. All a little more than six years ago. Happy
anniversary!
Weiss has known about this evidence for years, but he never filed charges because charges would have stopped the clock and preserved the case.
So day by day, the CEFC case has been vanishing. Just like the suspected Burisma bribery scheme from 2014–15. Just like whatever might potentially be incriminating regarding Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina’s $3.5 million payment to Hunter on
February 14, 2014.
During their negotiations with Weiss, in the interests of trying to work out a plea agreement that would give Hunter Biden wide-ranging immunity from prosecution, his lawyers offered to waive any statute-of-limitations defense. But Weiss never took them
up on that. He figured it was better just to sit on his hands and let the passage of time eviscerate the Biden case.
For this, Garland has now stamped him “special counsel,” with purportedly limitless authority to file charges. But what charges are left?
ScottW
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