Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler slapped President Biden with “Four Pinocchios” over his false claim that his son Hunter never made money from China.
Kessler began Tuesday’s fact-check of the president by revisiting comments he made in both presidential debates in 2020 when he repeatedly denied claims that Hunter did business with China.
“But now, nearly three years later, Biden’s assertions have been directly rebutted by Hunter himself,” Kessler wrote. “In court testimony last week, the younger Biden acknowledged that he in fact had been paid substantial sums in China — the first official confirmation that this was the case.”
The fact-checker laid out how Hunter Biden accompanied his father while he was vice president on an official trip to China in 2013 and “by Hunter’s own admission, he used the trip to connect with a Chinese business partner, even introducing the partner to his father.”
“Twelve days after he flew to Beijing, Hunter Biden joined the board of a just-formed investment advisory firm known as BHR (Bohai, Harvest and Rosemont), whose partners included Chinese entities, including the man he introduced to his father,” Kessler wrote.
“Separately, after Joe Biden left public office, Hunter Biden in 2017 inked a deal with CEFC China Energy, a Chinese energy conglomerate. The Washington Post reported last year that documents, including emails found on a Hunter Biden laptop that emerged during the final weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, showed that over the course of 14 months, the CEFC and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and President Biden’s brother, James. The Post did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC,” he said.
He went on to detail Hunter Biden’s exchange with U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika, who grilled him on his foreign business earnings including a $1 million retainer he received from Patrick Ho, a CEFC official who Kessler noted “would later be charged in the United States in connection with a multimillion-dollar scheme to bribe leaders from Chad and Uganda.”
Regarding the “Pinocchio Test,” Kessler concluded that while then-candidate Joe Biden was rebuffing various claims being made by then-President Trump during the debates, one of his comments was in direct response to a question from a moderator.