'Well, son of a bitch!' Bidens, CFR, CIA, & media cover-up.

[alloneword]

MoA gave a link to the whole clip:



Interesting body language from the guy on the right - anyone know who he is?

Not that I'm interested enough in this tripe to go find out myself, but if it's being denied by the 'gaters that this Ukrainian Investigator that Biden had fired was investigating his son, what then was the supposed rationale for Joe Biden seeking his firing?

[Wombaticus Rex]

L to R that's awkward fop Mike Carpenter, Biden's point man at his UPENN think thank/front, Uncle Touchy, currently foisting a vanity run for President on our great country, and the insufferable Dick Haass, CFR President and all around tryhard dicknose.

[RocketMan]

what then was the supposed rationale for Joe Biden seeking his firing?

As US vice president he was "tasked with" tackling corruption in Ukraine. This according to Forbes. So the official explanation is, he sought his removal because of corruption. Of course this begs the question, is it really just business as usual these days that the United States routinely blackmails foreign governments? If so, I welcome this new level of honesty, at least!

[alloneword]

Cheers, RM.

[MacCruiskeen]

September 28, 2019
On The Motives Behind Whistleblower-gate

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/09/o ... -gate.html

MoA is often essential reading, for example here. It's the most lucid and informative summary I've yet read, and a superb analysis of these Democrat/CIA * machinations. He concludes:

But there is also already a casualty on the side of the plotters against Trump.

The new Ukrainian president was looking for ways to make peace with Russia and had hoped that Trump would help him. The hawks had installed Kurt Volker as U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine to prevent any such moves. Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, had been hired by then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson but had demanded no pay. Volker is the hawkish head of the McCain Institute which received donations from George Soros' Open Society. He is also a partner in a public relation company that was hired by then President of Ukraine Poroshenko.

The whistleblower complain says that Volker visited Zelensky on July 26, one day after his call with Trump, to "provide advice to the Ukrainian leadership about how to 'navigate' the demands that the President had made of Mr. Zelenskyy."

Volker was the 'borg' member sent to Ukraine to exercise control over the Ukrainian government. He clearly tried to sabotage Trump's efforts to push Zelensky to investigate the Ukrainian side of the Russiagate and Biden affairs. Volker also wanted to prevent better relations with Russia.

Yesterday Volker suddenly left his job. Why? Was he one of those who fed the whistleblower with content for his complain? That Volker left now, before being fired by Trump for sabotaging his requests to and relations with Zelensky, is likely an unintended consequence of the whistleblower operation. ...

In practically every other account of this disastrously stupid gambit by Team Pelosi/Team Langley, Mr. Kurt Volker appears to have escaped without serious mention.

________________


* They are now as inseparable as Bayer and Monsanto. See here for an introduction (it's the first item in the 'Democrats 2019' thread):

The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party

by Patrick Martin

13 March 2018

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/0 ... s-m13.html

[RocketMan]

That bit about the definition of "whistleblower" being changed brought back fond memories of the changes in procedure in airline hijacks over the summer of 2001...

[Elvis]

Elvis, I think your a fair moderator, but this move sets a very bad precedent for RI, imo.

I didn't set the precedent. And members with long histories of thread disruption and "shouting down" tactics bring such requests on themselves. We have been over and over this a hundred times, and once again I refuse to be the bad guy for trying to foster good discussion.

This topic deserves exploration without constant re-paste reminders that "Trump is worse." We know that. There's this idea around that everything Not Trump must be Good because it's Not Trump, and it's crippling.

P.S. — SLaD and I have been in touch and everything's cool. We can all just do our best. I love you all.

[RocketMan]

Wow, I've just been reading about Hunter Biden. What a perfect speciment of a spoiled, entitled scion of the establishment. He has done an amazing number of douchey things in his life, mindblowing. Like the Dubya of Democrats.

[JackRiddler]

.

Theory: Biden and Trump are both elements of the same wealthy classes that rule and are sustained by a political-economic system designed in every way to concentrate wealth and power in these classes. The system is complicated and dynamic, features a multitude of actors including varieties of apparatchiks and self-service actors, and evolves through crisis. It's almost perpetually in crisis, and lives from them, but also loses operational coherence over time because the responses to many of the crises are works in progress and at least initially sloppy and provisional, until they are patched into something workable. Other factors that fray its coherence include legacy procedures that clash with current needs. Also, it's a system that enshrines petty competitions and thus constant conflicts among the players. Some of the conflicts are based in actual differences of sub-class or factional interests. Some of them happen just because there is a clash over which player gets a goodie.

Set-up, the Bidens: Biden and Trump functionally occupy different roles. Biden's is within the management of the political apparatus, Trump's is as a self-service entrepreneur (management, entrepreneur, most of these terms should be in quotes!) engaged in the capture of rent and plunder and generally in autonomous side-grift. Biden's son straddles the two roles. He has made a career of shadowing his father's activities so as to extract payments through their shared name and presumed connection. He shows up on the sidelines wherever his father is an obvious actor within the policy being pursued and receives contracts from actors who wish to influence that policy or acquire the appearance of being close to the action. It's probably done professionally (again, the poverty of the words) in the sense that they don't need to coordinate or communicate directly about this, and are well-advised to avoid that. It suffices that Hunter can offer himself to an outfit like Burisma, or be called in by it, as the lawyer and consultant Hunter Biden, who only happens to be (ha ha, wink and nod) the son of the vice-president who is charged with conducting policy in a given sphere, in this case Ukraine. Hunter doesn't have to do much more than that to receive a form of tribute on the assumption that it will benefit the tribute-givers just on the strength of the appearance of the influence that being connected to him confers. What he provides otherwise as a consultant may or may not be useful. Biden and Hunter may genuinely be operating separately on a question such as whether pressure should be applied to fire the prosecutor, which is being decided in what passes for the councils of state within the administration and its environment of policy lobbyists and international bodies.

Set-up, the Trump: Coming from a different sector with other functions and rules, Trump has learned to operate in a more directly transactional, less regulated capacity when seizing what he wants or demanding that something be done his way. This is largely a matter of Trump not even knowing how to do this a different way, not maintaining the apparent formal separation between his decisions and the channels through which they are carried out, since this was how it worked in the world that he operated within in the past, which is several levels lower than Biden's organizationally even if Trump is presumably much richer. You make a call and get your men in to do the thing that you want. If you get it, they are rewarded, if you don't, they are fired. Things do not just happen as in Biden's world, as a matter of the whole world having been rendered routine to the opportunism of the son. Now president, Trump also doesn't know how to do it like Biden, and absolutely doesn't want to learn how to do it that way. It doesn't satisfy his need for immediate gratification and personal dominance expressions. He does it like he's still operating on the level he rose up in, the one just above the Tony Soprano equivalents but below the banks within the NY-NJ development gangster milieu. It's a cultural difference. This is not how you steal things at Biden's level. You don't want your hand in there, grasping and potentially visible. You just let the money flow toward you.

Psychology: Of course, as men of a certain culture, they are not very different: Both especially enjoy the opportunities for macho dominance expressions, and make these into spectacles, enjoying the applause. These moments are where they each can produce their own downfall, where they feel like demigods and masters with their worshippers arrayed before them, and are thus at their blindest. I'm not going to argue Biden has more self-control than Trump. They have both been able to express this side of themselves constantly within contexts that allowed and seemed to celebrate it. But now they are both in different worlds: Trump as the big tribal chief in the White House, Biden as the presumed presidential front-runner. (He's been running for a long time, but was never this far on top in the league tables).

Story: From all appearances, as a matter of consensus among the policy makers charged with managing the Ukraine transition, Biden was supposed to do the job of pressuring for the firing of the prosecutor, and the prosecutor was actually corrupt and, contrary to what we seem to believe, avoiding a Burisma investigation. In this the prosecutor would be like his predecessors and presumably all of his potential replacements and successors. But the crunch had come: Burisma had been caught out laundering in Britain, and the UK complaint was not being pursued in Kiev. More fundamentally, appearances of US power had to be maintained at that moment. Ukraine was in the process of being regime-changed and so a determination was made (in places you will never know exactly) that the old prosecutor had to go, just as the finance minister was replaced directly by the former State Department official in charge of handling financial relations with Ukraine.

Detour: Yes. Look it up. I'll post more later. Or wait, I did in the Kiev Discredited thread, see this post. "An American citizen born in the U.S. [to Ukrainian immigrant parents], a State Department official formerly charged with managing financial relations with Kiev, was offered the finance minister job in the Maidan government - and took it. She was given Ukrainian citizenship on the day of her appointment. She promptly made the agreements that ran their foreign debt to IMF-EU up by another 40 billion dollars. Who owns your country, baby? And here's the kicker: After two years she got to call mission accomplished on that mess, and took the job as the chief of PROMESA, the Puerto Rico debt junta! They really don't bother to disguise anything and they don't have to, never had, and never will, because the miseducation system, the culture of political apathy, and the corporate media make sure almost no one hears these stories or learns the contexts and histories and reasons why they matter.")

The Drama: Is the prosecutor's removal good for Hunter, is it bad for Hunter? Who knows? It's almost certainly totally indifferent. Hunter's playing his own grift, and it's legalized. (Trump's grifts were also mostly legalized, de facto if not de jure, back when he was playing at his accustomed level.) Off in other cities, other board rooms, Hunter's just watching the contract money roll in, and it's as green as it should be. That is all that matters to him presumably. Joe may not even know about it. It's better for them if he doesn't. Poor Trump has the disadvantage of having to do his own dirty work, and the flaw that he really likes it that way and doesn't want to adapt to the way things are done in a White House as opposed to a Trump Tower.

What's next? In any case, now that this has developed to this point, it likely will be Biden who will be ruined as a candidate, while Trump after impeachment will not be convicted in the Senate and remain as beastly as ever going into the 2020 campaign. This is the fundamental strategic idiocy of the Democrats on the electoral level at work. It's an intentional, planned idiocy, since they're not allowed to gain popularity by advocating the popular policies, since these are contrary to the political-economic system designed in every way to concentrate wealth and power in the classes that rule. That's the Democrats' conundrum. They can't just win by speaking truth and doing the things that the majority wants, since that would be too much system change.

* * *

Further reading. Risen is suspect, especially the last couple of years after his own travails and possible disciplining by the security state and discovery of #Russiagate as if it was real. But this report, unfavorable to Biden, was written in 2015. It shows how grift at this level works, unconscionably, but it also makes clear why the Hunter Biden grift was legalized business as usual. The article has been spun now to falsely imply the prosecutor was the good guy whom Biden forced out so as to save Burisma for his son. That's not how it worked, and I say that with some confidence because that is not how it needed to work. After the February 2014 coup, Joe's playing the guy charged by US-international policy consensus to force Ukraine to "crack down on corruption," including Burisma, which of course isn't going to happen even after the prosecutor is replaced. The son is the guy who stepped up to Burisma and said, I can help advise you in this difficult time. The two functions do not need to be coordinated. The son is well-advised to just take the money, play lawyer, and avoid exposing his father to any quid pro quos. They're both doing what they do and being rewarded for it, just at that time. The son's action is predicated entirely on the fact that he has this father, so it's a grift, but it's not illegal, and presumably the father's proud that his son is off the coke and so good on the make. Only later does this turn into a problem for the elder Biden (aaaaaaawwww) and a club for Trump to grab and start smashing furniture, including his own.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/worl ... -ties.html

http://www.nytimes.com
Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch
By James Risen

[Image] Hunter Biden at a campaign event in 2008. He sits on the board of one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies. CreditCreditOzier Muhammad/The New York Times


WASHINGTON — When Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveled to Kiev , Ukraine, on Sunday for a series of meetings with the country’s leaders, one of the issues on his agenda was to encourage a more aggressive fight against Ukraine’s rampant corruption and stronger efforts to rein in the power of its oligarchs.

But the credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.

Hunter Biden, 45, a former Washington lobbyist, joined the Burisma board in April 2014. That month, as part of an investigation into money laundering, British officials froze London bank accounts containing $23 million that allegedly belonged to Mr. Zlochevsky.

Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, an independent government agency, specifically forbade Mr. Zlochevksy, as well as Burisma Holdings, the company’s chief legal officer and another company owned by Mr. Zlochevsky, to have any access to the accounts.

But after Ukrainian prosecutors refused to provide documents needed in the investigation, a British court in January ordered the Serious Fraud Office to unfreeze the assets. The refusal by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office to cooperate was the target of a stinging attack by the American ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who called out Burisma’s owner by name in a speech in September.

“In the case of former Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, the U.K. authorities had seized $23 million in illicit assets that belonged to the Ukrainian people,” Mr. Pyatt said. Officials at the prosecutor general’s office, he added, were asked by the United Kingdom “to send documents supporting the seizure. Instead they sent letters to Zlochevsky’s attorneys attesting that there was no case against him. As a result, the money was freed by the U.K. court, and shortly thereafter the money was moved to Cyprus.”

Mr. Pyatt went on to call for an investigation into “the misconduct” of the prosecutors who wrote the letters. In his speech, the ambassador did not mention Hunter Biden’s connection to Burisma.

But Edward C. Chow, who follows Ukrainian policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the involvement of the vice president’s son with Mr. Zlochevsky’s firm undermined the Obama administration’s anticorruption message in Ukraine.

“Now you look at the Hunter Biden situation, and on the one hand you can credit the father for sending the anticorruption message,” Mr. Chow said. “But I think unfortunately it sends the message that a lot of foreign countries want to believe about America, that we are hypocritical about these issues.”

Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman for the vice president, said Hunter Biden’s business dealings had no impact on his father’s policy positions in connection with Ukraine.

“Hunter Biden is a private citizen and a lawyer,” she said. “The vice president does not endorse any particular company and has no involvement with this company. The vice president has pushed aggressively for years, both publicly with groups like the U.S.-Ukraine Business Forum and privately in meetings with Ukrainian leaders, for Ukraine to make every effort to investigate and prosecute corruption in accordance with the rule of law. It will once again be a key focus during his trip this week.”

Ryan F. Toohey, a Burisma spokesman, said that Hunter Biden would not comment for this article.

It is not known how Mr. Biden came to the attention of the company. Announcing his appointment to the board, Alan Apter, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker who is chairman of Burisma, said, “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals.”

Joining the board at the same time was one of Mr. Biden’s American business partners, Devon Archer. Both are involved with Rosemont Seneca Partners, an American investment firm with offices in Washington.

Mr. Biden is the younger of the vice president’s two sons. His brother, Beau, died of brain cancer in May. In the past, Hunter Biden attracted an unusual level of scrutiny and even controversy. In 2014, he was discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine use. He received a commission as an ensign in 2013, and he served as a public affairs officer.

Before his father was vice president, Mr. Biden also briefly served as president of a hedge fund group, Paradigm Companies, in which he was involved with one of his uncles, James Biden, the vice president’s brother. That deal went sour amid lawsuits in 2007 and 2008 involving the Bidens and an erstwhile business partner. Mr. Biden, a graduate of Georgetown University and Yale Law School, also worked as a lobbyist before his father became vice president.

Burisma does not disclose the compensation of its board members because it is a privately held company, Mr. Toohey said Monday, but he added that the amount was “not out of the ordinary” for similar corporate board positions.

Asked about the British investigation, which is continuing, Mr. Toohey said, “Not only was the case dismissed and the company vindicated by the outcome, but it speaks volumes that all his legal costs were recouped.”

In response to Mr. Pyatt’s criticism of the Ukrainian handling of Mr. Zlochevsky’s case, Mr. Toohey said that “strong corporate governance and transparency are priorities shared both by the United States and the leadership of Burisma. Burisma is working to bring the energy sector into the modern era, which is critical for a free and strong Ukraine.”

Vice President Biden has played a leading role in American policy toward Ukraine as Washington seeks to counter Russian intervention in Eastern Ukraine. This week’s visit was his fifth trip to Ukraine as vice president.

Ms. Bedingfield said Hunter Biden had never traveled to Ukraine with his father. She also said that Ukrainian officials had never mentioned Hunter Biden’s role with Burisma to the vice president during any of his visits.

“I’ve got to believe that somebody in the vice president’s office has done some due diligence on this,” said Steven Pifer, who was the American ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000. “I should say that I hope that has happened. I would hope that they have done some kind of check, because I think the vice president has done a very good job of sending the anticorruption message in Ukraine, and you would hate to see something like this undercut that message.”


A version of this article appears in print on
Dec. 9, 2015, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Vice President, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch.

[MacCruiskeen]

Wow, I've just been reading about Hunter Biden. What a perfect speciment of a spoiled, entitled scion of the establishment. He has done an amazing number of douchey things in his life, mindblowing. Like the Dubya of Democrats.

Yes, it's hard not to wonder (though only, of course, if you're a "conspiracy theorist") exactly what role this pillar of integrity, sobriety and business probity was intended to play in that vaunted "anti-corruption drive" led by his dad, the (aptly titled) Vice President. For what, nearly five years, this young moral firebrand was pocketing forty fifty thousand bucks a month for whatever valuable services he was rendering.

Anyway, he's stepped down now, apparently. (Why? To head UNESCO?) No doubt the grateful Ukrainian nation will name a public square after him, in fond memory of his uncorruptness. Or maybe they'll put his face on a banknote.

[JackRiddler]

Yes, it's hard not to wonder (though only, of course, if you're a "conspiracy theorist") exactly what role this pillar of integrity, sobriety and business probity was intended to play in his dad the (aptly titled) Vice President's vaunted "anti-corruption drive".

Probably none. He's a barnacle sucking cash out on the side. See above essay.

[MacCruiskeen]

Yeah, I was only joking, Jack. Clearly Biden Jr. was appointed for his family name and family connections.

On edit: googling something I had misremembered about Chris Heinz (John Kerry's stepson and Hunter B's former business partner), I find he's in the news again today. It seems he warned Biden Jr even back then that his appointment to the Burisma board would not look good.

Hunter Biden had falling out with business partner over Ukraine gig
By Mark Moore

September 29, 2019 | 2:16pm

​Hunter Biden’s decision to join the board of gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch led to a falling out with his investment firm partner – the stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, according to a report on Sunday.

Chris Heinz ended his business relationship when Biden in 2014 took a position on the board of Burisma Holdings, which was owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, even as his father then-Vice President Joe Biden was serving in the Obama administration and cracking down on corruption in Ukraine, the Washington Post reported.

Hunter Biden, a partner with Heinz in the investment firm Rosemont Seneca, joined Burisma shortly after another of the firm’s partners, Devon Archer, also had accepted an invitation to the board.

Heinz parted ways with both men after raising concerns about corruption in Ukraine and questions about appearance.

“The lack of judgment in this matter was a major catalyst for Mr. Heinz ending his business relationships with Mr. Archer and Mr. Biden,” Heinz spokesman Chris Bastardi told the newspaper.

According to the report, Biden said he joined Burisma at the urging of the former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who was on the company’s board, and because he believed helping to create Ukraine’s energy independence would help ​shield the country from Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

[...]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com ... -gig/amp//

("Chris Bastardi". Sic. Ideal name for a lawyer. I wonder if he's related to Alan B'stard.)


https://youtu.be/SYfOmupcI_w

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Excellent breakdown, JR. Thank you for committing to electronic record [and therefore, Google indexing...].


A few added 'breadcrumbs', along the lines indicated above/in this thread:


https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-mcco ... 1559590152

[I somehow managed to copy the below text despite WSJ's paywall by going in incognito mode...]

...

Speaking of the New York Times, the paper recently reported on overseas business pursued by Hunter Biden and an associate named Devon Archer. The Times reports that their work in China and Ukraine “concerned a business partner of Mr. Biden and Mr. Archer, Christopher Heinz, the stepson of John Kerry, who was then secretary of state.” The paper adds that Mr. Heinz thought their work “created the appearance of selling influence, according to a person familiar with the conversation... Mr. Heinz, who was not involved in the China or Ukraine efforts, began decoupling his business interests from those of Mr. Biden and Mr. Archer.”


If their work bothered a friend and business partner perhaps it will bother voters as well. It’s not clear what value Hunter Biden adds when he does deals overseas. But while his father was vice president he seems to have been treated in China as a financier of the first rank. Shortly after Hunter Biden travelled with his father to China aboard Air Force Two, the younger Biden’s firm Rosemont Seneca scored a business coup. In 2014, the Journal’s Chao Deng reported:

A consortium of foreign and Chinese private-equity firms is aiming to raise about $1.5 billion to invest abroad, with the yuan-denominated portion of the fund to be converted to U.S. dollars through Shanghai’s free-trade zone.

The fund—launched by Chinese asset managers Bohai Industrial Investment Fund Management Co. and Harvest Fund Management Co. alongside U.S. investment and advisory firms Rosemont Seneca Partners and Thornton Group LLC—started fundraising in the second quarter, and has raised its target to $1.5 billion from an original $1 billion plan, a spokesman at Bank of China International Holdings Ltd. said. BOCI is one of the largest stakeholders in Bohai.

Participating in such a deal was not a privilege extended to every foreign firm. Noted the Journal:

The Bohai-Harvest fund is likely one of the biggest Sino-foreign collaborations in private equity to take advantage of the free-trade zone’s benefits in converting yuan to dollars that can then be invested in foreign companies. The funds are raising a combination of yuan and U.S. dollars... Normally, China restricts free conversion of its currency.

The deal was perhaps also remarkable because to that point much of Hunter Biden’s expertise lay in the business of influence rather than investing. In 2013 Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote in the New York Times:

Until 2008, R. Hunter Biden, son of then-Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., lobbied Congress regularly. The Washington Post reported last year that “56 relatives of lawmakers have been paid to influence Congress” since 2007.

While the House and Senate passed rules to limit some lobbying, the House left enough wiggle room for parents and children of lawmakers to still lobby.

AND:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BHR_Partners

BHR was founded in 2013[1] by Chinese asset managers Bohai Industrial Investment Fund Management Co. and Harvest Fund Management Co. and U.S. investment and advisory firms Rosemont Seneca Partners, co-founded by Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz and Devon Archer,[2] and Thornton Group LLC.[3] The company website in 2016 reported that Bohai Capital managed the RMB20 Billion and Harvest ranks among China's largest mutual fund management companies. The website said the company has "the support of Bank of China, China Development Bank Capital, and other major Chinese financial institutions.[1] Bohai Harvest has also partnered with a subsidiary of China's conglomerate HNA Group.[4]

The firm set out in 2014 to raise $1.5 billion for investments, some in dollars and some in yuan. The yuan investments were to be converted to U.S. dollars through Shanghai Free-Trade Zone, facilitating offshore investment for Chinese investors. Rosemont Seneca is a Washington, D.C.-based investment and advisory firm run by Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.[4] Hunter Biden partnered with James Bulger, son of former Massachusetts state Senate President William Bulger. According to The Intercept, business registration filings in China list Hunter Biden and James Bulger as key officials at Bohai Harvest.[4] Thornton Group is a Boston-based cross-border investment advisory firm. The U.S. partners as a pair and the two Chinese partners each own a 30% stake in the joint management firm.[3]

Transactions

2014 - Approximately RMB4 billion in the Chinese pilot State-Owned Enterprises reform deal "involving the segregation and capitalization of Sinopec Group’s non-oil business into Sinopec Marketing Corporation";

2015 - Henniges Automotive[5] with strategic partner, AVIC Auto;[6] total transaction valued at around US$600 million;
Investments in China General Nuclear (CGN), 3Bio Inc., and Didi Taxi.[7] In 2016, the U.S. Justice Department charged CGN with stealing nuclear secrets from the United States.[8][9][10]

In November, 2016, BHR agreed to purchase Lundin Mining Corp's minority stake in African copper mine Tenke Fungurume Mining S.A. for $1.14 billion in cash. Lundin held a 30% interest in TF Holdings, a holding company, and an effective 24% stake in the mining operation. Freeport-McMoRan Inc. currently owns the remaining 70% stake in TF Holdings (an effective 56% of the mine), but is in the process of selling its stake to China Molybdenum Co. for a reported $2.65 billion.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the Tenke mine is located, owns the remaining 20% of the mine.[11] According to Oxfam, "the Government of DRC knew nothing about [transaction] until after it happened."[12]

In 2017, BHR invested in a Chinese technology company Megvii.[13][4]

AND:

https://theintercept.com/2019/05/03/bid ... -business/

On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch released a troubling report about a phone application made by the Chinese government. The app provides law enforcement with easy, daily access to data detailing the religious activity, blood type, and even the amount of electricity used by ethnic minority Muslims living in the western province of Xinjiang.

The app relies heavily on facial recognition software supplied by Face++, a division of the Chinese startup Megvii, a relationship that sparked questions in the press for Megvii investors. One of the most prominent of these investors is Alibaba Group Holding, which was co-founded by Jack Ma, the wealthiest Chinese billionaire and an icon for the country’s image of entrepreneurship.

The flurry of media reports this week about Face++, Ma, and the role of the private sector in building China’s increasingly sprawling surveillance state, however, left out another prominent investor in the company: Hunter Biden.

The son of the former Vice President Joe Biden has spent much of the last decade building overseas investments and business deals, arrangements that could complicate his father’s bid for the presidency by posing an array of potential conflicts of interest.

Hunter Biden’s investment company in China, known as Bohai Harvest RST, has pooled money, largely from state-owned venture capital, to buy or invest in a range of industries in the U.S. and China. Bohai Harvest has put money into an automotive firm, mining companies, and technology ventures, such as Didi Chuxing Technology, one of the largest ride-hailing companies in the world after Uber. (Hunter Biden, Bohai Harvest, and Joe Biden’s presidential campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

In 2017, Bohai Harvest bought into Face++, part of a $460 million haul in the company’s Series C investment round. Bohai Harvest’s website features Face++ in its portfolio of investments.

[JackRiddler]

Hmph, that Heinz. Has to go and display his superior class, make a show of his integrity, tell the Archer-Biden boys they're brutes and know nothing of manners, also show he can lose the business and not worry, since he's on another level of wealth from them. At least, that is how the boys might have seen it. And it's another thing Trump and Biden have in common: both are risers and still make a public show of being bitter about having been born merely privileged compared to 99% of everyone who's ever lived, rather than at the Heinzish level god intended them to have.

This is going to be good insofar as it might put the end to Biden sooner rather than later, sparing us from him during the next few months before the primaries, and thus ending this unbearable focus on two very similar assholes doing dick measurements.

[Harvey]

.

It's an intentional, planned idiocy, since they're not allowed to gain popularity by advocating the popular policies, since these are contrary to the political-economic system designed in every way to concentrate wealth and power in the classes that rule. That's the Democrats' conundrum. They can't just win by speaking truth and doing the things that the majority wants, since that would be too much system change.

That's the whole of it, really.