Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand lies.
Such is the case with the belated release of official photos of a 2013 visit to China by then-Vice President Joe Biden, accompanied by—whaddya know!—his son Hunter. In several photos, Hunter is shown meeting with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and in another he’s seen shaking hands with China’s then-vice president, Li Yuanchao. In other pictures, Hunter’s dad shakes hands with Jonathan Li, the CEO of a Chinese firm seeking to acquire energy companies across the world. Shortly after the trip, the Chinese government approved the license to create Li’s company, BHR Partners, in which Hunter would eventually acquire a 10 percent stake.
BHR Partners is primarily funded by Chinese nationals and entities, including the country’s primary investment bank. Between 2013 and 2019, it invested $2.5 billion in energy and other ventures across the world, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal. Hunter held on to his 10 percent stake in BHR through at least 2017. He said he eventually relinquished his stake to the entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris, perhaps as a means to repay the millions of dollars in loans Morris had made to Hunter over the years.
The details of this buckraking scheme were unearthed thanks to the Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the dogged reporting of the New York Post, which broke the first stories on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election.
It was in 2019, during former president Donald Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, that Hunter’s business in China first became a national story. At the time, Congressional Democrats were probing Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine to investigate Hunter’s lobbying on behalf of a Ukrainian energy company. Trump then floated the notion that Hunter was not only corrupted by Ukrainian interests, but Chinese interests as well. In response, Joe Biden flatly denied ever meeting with his son’s many business associates or even speaking with Hunter about these matters. He’s repeatedly made that statement ever since.
In March 2024, when confronted on the White House lawn about the House impeachment committee’s findings into his interactions with Biden family business associates, Biden said, “I did not interact with their partners.”
Really?
The House Oversight Committee has documented 16 separate times that Biden lied about his knowledge or involvement with his family’s influence peddling. These deceptions began when Biden was running for the Democratic nomination in his party’s primary. “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” he said two months before the election—a line he repeated throughout the presidential campaign. Once Biden was president, his White House continued to promote this fiction.
If this were just a case of a president and his aides trying to wriggle out of a scandal, it would be one thing. But the peculiar dynamics of the Trump era made the Democrats, the FBI, and the legacy press coconspirators in the cover-up.
This all starts, of course, with Hunter’s abandoned laptop at a Wilmington computer repair shop. That laptop was like a skeleton key, unlocking a series of Biden family secrets, from Hunter’s addiction to crack cocaine to the emails and texts between Hunter and his father on the very business arrangements the president was insisting he never spoke about with his son.
When the New York Post first reported on the laptop three weeks before the 2020 election, social media companies, the mainstream media, and the Biden campaign all insisted the story was fake. Fifty-one former senior U.S. intelligence officials signed a letter claiming the Post story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” When Trump debated Biden before the election, Biden referred to that letter and claimed the laptop story was “garbage.”
It wasn’t.
In fact, the FBI had verified the contents of the laptop a year earlier. Yet in an act of shocking deception, the bureau told social media companies that Russians were planning to interfere with the 2020 election by planting false stories or hacked or forged materials. When asked by the social media companies whether the FBI knew if the laptop was authentic, the bureau offered no comment, according to 2023 testimony from a senior member of the FBI’s foreign influence task force.
The successful laptop cover-up fed Biden’s hubris when he was president. Sure, conservative outlets like the New York Post and House Republicans would dig into the matter. But these were not considered “legitimate” sources by bastions of the legacy press like The New York Times or The Washington Post.
This summer, after the Justice Department presented Hunter’s laptop as evidence in a felony trial against him, The Washington Post’s Philip Bump still made the case that the media did nothing wrong in 2020. “It is politically useful for the right and for Trump to suggest that the Hunter Biden trial revealed something novel and incriminating about the traditional media,” Bump wrote. “It didn’t, but readers of this article probably don’t need to be convinced of that.”
With coverage like that, Biden never faced much pressure from the press or members of his own party to explain his past denials even as they were being discredited by the drip, drip, drip of more damning evidence.
Nor did Biden have to worry about these embarrassing photos from China being released by the National Archives. Like the FBI in 2020, the organization was also willing to play politics to help him. The Trump-aligned America First Legal Foundation had initially sued the National Archives and Records Administration in 2022 for the photos. After objections from former president Barack Obama and Biden himself, the archives delayed the release until after the 2024 election, when the scandal was likely to be overtaken by events. As, indeed, it has been.
In some ways this final sordid chapter of the drama captures the broader scandal in miniature. The evidence that Biden’s son monetized the family’s name was always there. But too many of Washington’s elites believed that acknowledging this scandalous behavior would lead to the election of Trump, first in 2020 and then later in 2024. So they ignored Biden’s obvious lies. And in so doing they made a better argument for the endemic corruption of the Washington swamp than Trump himself ever could.
