A former close business associate of Hunter Biden has told Congress that President Biden was aware of his son’s business dealings and even discussed the “broad contours” of those arrangements after he left the White House in 2017. The associate says that Biden family members “sold” the elder Mr. Biden’s name to foreign entities for tens of millions of dollars, dangling the prospect of access to the family patriarch. “For nearly four years, I have tried to tell the American people the truth about serious corruption at the very top of their government,” the associate, Tony Bobulinski, told the House Oversight and Judiciary committees, which are leading the impeachment probe into the president. Mr. Bobulinski worked with the younger Mr. Biden at one of the Biden family’s many consulting outfits. This venture — SinoHawk Holdings — involved the first son and the president’s younger brother, James Biden, and was intended to develop infrastructure, energy, and technology partnerships between American firms and entities in Communist China. “I want to be crystal clear: From my direct personal experience and what I have subsequently come to learn, it is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the Brand’ being sold by the Biden family,” Mr. Bobulinski told House impeachment investigators. “His family’s foreign influence peddling operation — from China to Ukraine and elsewhere — sold out to foreign actors who were seeking to gain influence and access to Joe Biden and the United States government.”“Joe Biden was more than a participant in and beneficiary of his family’s business; he was an enabler, despite being buffered by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability,” he continued. Mr. Bobulinski, who is a Navy veteran from a family with a long tradition of career military service, first made national news just hours before a 2020 presidential debate. He appeared in front of cameras to detail his relationship with the first son and how he believed the Biden family was engaging in a corrupt scheme. He also first made the allegations that money from foreign entities was set aside by Biden associates for “the Big Guy,” whom Mr. Bobulinski says is the president.“I am making this statement to set the record straight about the involvement of the Biden family — Vice President Biden, his brother Jim Biden, and his son Hunter Biden — in dealings with the Chinese,” Mr. Bobulinski said at the time. “I have heard Joe Biden say he has never discussed business with Hunter. That is false. I have firsthand knowledge about this because I directly dealt with the Biden family, including Joe Biden.”Mr. Bobulinski blamed the “so-called mainstream media” and the federal government for not taking his accusations seriously for all these years. He says that he met with the elder Mr. Biden in 2017 to discuss his and the first son’s burgeoning relationship with a Chinese energy company, CEFC. Members of the Biden family were paid millions of dollars as the company, which had close ties to the Chinese government, pursued energy deals in America.“Joe Biden was aware of the CEFC transaction, enabled it, and had a constitutional responsibility and obligation to the American people to shut it down before it began,” Mr. Bobulinski alleges. “This is because CEFC had been identified as a known surrogate of the Chinese Communist Party by the U.S. government and prosecutors in the Southern District of New York as far back as 2016.”Federal prosecutions at Manhattan had connected CEFC to an international bribery scheme that existed long before Messrs. Bobulinski and Biden met. A Chinese national, Patrick Ho, for years tried to bribe top government officials in Chad and Uganda to facilitate energy deals for CEFC by funneling cash through American non-governmental organizations. He went so far as to offer the president of Chad $2 million hidden in gift boxes in order to win contracts from his government for CEFC. Mr. Bobulinski says that he met with the president, who was then a private citizen, “multiple times” in California to discuss the CEFC deal. “The only reason Joe Biden met with me privately during the Milken Institute Global Conference and seated me at his head table was because I was a business associate of the Biden family,” he says. Mr. Bobulinski says that Congress must investigate Mr. Biden’s involvement in his son’s foreign dealings as a “high crime and misdemeanor,” and prosecutors should look into the president’s involvement as well. “Under U.S. corruption laws, political office holders can be held as responsible as the immediate family members who are receiving money directly. This makes common sense and Americans understand this,” Mr. Bobulinski says. “The facts we are going to discuss today appear to me to present disturbing evidence, which these committees should thoroughly investigate, with respect to possible violations by Joe Biden of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”The chairman of the Oversight Committee, James Comer, tells the Sun that he expects to hear from more material witnesses in the coming weeks as he pursues the impeachment of Mr. Biden. Next on Mr. Comer’s schedule is an appearance by the president’s younger brother, James Biden, which the Sun first exclusively reported. He will appear on February 21. One week later, the first son will make his much-anticipated appearance before impeachment investigators, which he has been trying to dodge for months.
