Biden’s niece talked with Hunter while she was serving as Treasury official during Obama admin about potential China investment

President Biden’s niece - while working at the Obama administration’s Treasury Department - shared tips with first son Hunter Biden about China’s largest government wealth fund, which he later sought as a potential investment opportunity, according to emails on his abandoned laptop.

Casey Owens, the daughter of first sister Valerie Biden Owens, notified her cousin and his business partners at now-defunct Rosemont Seneca Advisors about an investment conference held by China Investment Corporation (CIC) while working as a special assistant for the department’s US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, an April 12, 2010, email shows.

“FYI on recent CIC investment conference at a resort in Sanya, on Hainan Island, over the weekend of March 27-28,” Owens wrote to Hunter and his partner Eric Schwerin in the missive from her official Treasury email account, along with text from an article by AsianInvestor.com.

The conference was billed as a “coming out” party for the sovereign wealth fund, which held hundreds of billions of dollars, after a successful return on its international investments the previous year, according to the piece.

Hunter Biden had met and posed for pictures with CIC General Manager and Chief Investment Officer Gao Xiqing a few days earlier, according to a 2020 report on his overseas ventures compiled by Senate Republicans.

As Rosemont Seneca’s chairman, Hunter had “visited Chinese financial institutions and fund companies from April 7th to 9th,” according to an April 12, 2010, press release from the Boston investment advisory firm Thornton Group, “aiming to further deepen mutual understanding and explore the possibility of commercial cooperation and opportunity.”

Republicans may want to talk to Eric Schwerin since emails from the hard drive show Schwerin moving money on behalf of Joe and Hunter while helping the latter handle family expenses. Schwerin received Joe Biden’s “Delaware tax refund check” while he was vice president and he and Hunter talked by phone about Joe Biden’s mortgage.

In February 2014, Hunter advised Schwerin to describe himself as a “close confidant and counsel” to his VP dad WRT a letter of recommendation Schwerin was penning on Joe Biden’s behalf.

“I would tone down the ‘he and my son’ parts,” Hunter wrote. “I think it’s better to just focus on the fact that you have been a close confidant and counsel to him.

The Post reported 2/23 that Eric Schwerin was involved in the transfer of Joe Biden’s Senate papers to the U of Delaware in March 2010 — which may have included “sensitive” and “classified” documents.

The Biden Family’s Strange Business History
BY BEN SCHRECKINGER, Politico
AUGUST 3, 2019

Over his decades in office, the self-described ‘Middle-Class Joe’s’ family fortunes have closely tracked his political career. Ironically, Joe Biden presents himself as a “corrective” to a system ge sees as “rigged by financiers and networked corporate elites.”

Many Bidens surface in hjgh paid, make-work government jobs, and are hired by Fortune 500 companies in privileged jobs that exploit Joe Biden’s legislative interests.....jobs that are off-limits to non-Biden everyday Americans.

snip

Hunter had more success pursuing business in Asia and Europe. After buying Paradigm, he went into business with former Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz, and Heinz’s friend, Devon Archer. They formed a variety of investment-focused firms under the name Rosemont Seneca.

As they set about searching for deals, Hunter and Archer were eager to land business in China.

In late 2013, Hunter traveled with his father to Beijing, where the vice president was set to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

While there, Hunter introduced one of his business partners, Jonathan Li of the Beijing-based private equity firm Bohai Capital, to his father, according to The New Yorker. Hunter and Archer had just concluded a large real estate deal with Bohai. In May of 2019, The Intercept reported that Hunter’s Chinese investment vehicle, Bohai Harvest RST, was invested in a firm that developed facial-recognition technology used in Chinese state-backed surveillance efforts.

In 2014, as Joe Biden led the administration’s response to the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in southern Ukraine, Hunter and Archer received appointments to the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings. Hunter’s monthly pay from Burisma was reportedly as high as $50,000 in some months.

Last June, Archer was convicted in federal court in New York for an unrelated fraud targeting a Native American tribe and pension funds. In November, a judge granted Archer a retrial.

A spokesman for Heinz, Chris Bastardi, said the ketchup fortune heir had nothing to do with Hunter’s foreign dealings. “Neither Mr. Heinz, nor any business in which he had an interest, was involved in Burisma or Bohai Harvest RST.”

Biden and his wife, Jill, have set about providing for themselves, earning more than $15 million in the two years following the end of his vice presidency in early 2017.

Since his father left office, Hunter has cultivated a relationship with the Chinese billionaire Ye Jianming. Hunter told The New Yorker the pair had partnered on a natural gas venture in Louisiana and that Ye had once gifted him a large diamond.

Hunter also dealt with Ye’s deputy, Patrick Ho. In November 2017, federal agents in New York arrested Ho on suspicion of bribing government officials in Chad and Uganda. Ho’s first call, according to The New York Times, was to James Biden, who told the paper Ho had been trying to reach Hunter.

Ho was convicted on seven counts in December. Ye has disappeared from public view, and his name has surfaced in a corruption case in China.

snip

In 2017, Joe Biden told a Vanity Fair writer that he sometimes wished that one of his children had gotten rich in order to provide for him in his old age.

Yet Biden and his wife, Jill, have amply provided for themselves, earning more than $15 million ...... just in the two years following the end of his vice presidency in early 2017.

Hunter recently told The New Yorker that he lives on $4,000 a month and that he offered to pay his ex-wife $37,000 a month in alimony and child support for 10 years.

In 2012, Fox Business pegged James Biden’s net worth at $7 million. In 2013, James and Sara Biden bought a vacation house on Keewaydin Island in Florida for $2.5 million. While the house served for several years as a family getaway amid beautiful surroundings, it did not pay off as an investment. After James and Sara put it on the market in early 2016 with an initial asking price of $5.9 million; it sold for just $1.35 million in 2018.

long read here

https://www.politico.eu/article/joe-biden-presidential-bid-family-business-history-democrats/

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