America's Retreat by 1,000 Small Steps

Because the Biden family has been so deeply involved and so vehemently denied their involvement with Chinese business, the next question is as inescapable as the first: Does the flow of money to the Biden family from China influence the foreign policy of the United States? (Image source: iStock)

President Joe Biden has been lying about his knowledge and likely his involvement in his son's business dealings since at least 2018.

That is the inescapable conclusion to draw from a short voicemail recording discovered on the laptop computer that belonged to his son, Hunter and reported by The Daily Mail and The New York Post recently.

It begins innocently enough. "Hey pal, it's Dad," Joe Biden begins. "It's 8:15 on Wednesday night. If you get a chance, just give me a call. Nothing urgent. I just wanted to talk to you."

The elder Biden then turns to a specific subject. That subject was the publication of a New York Times article detailing how, in 2014, "Ye Jianming courted the Biden family and networked with former United States security officials." The article offers some details of Ye's efforts to lure Hunter Biden into business deals that would enrich him and curry favor with his father, vice president of the United States and the recently designated "point person" for the administration of President Barack Obama on China.

Biden's voicemail to Hunter continues: "I thought the article released online, it's going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good," Biden said. "I think you're clear. And anyway if you get a chance, give me a call, I love you."

On its own, this is not dispositive. It could be explained as a politician's take on a news story that implicates his own son in business dealings with a Chinese investor whose commercial enterprises went into default. But placed into proper context, against what had already been reported in my 2018 book, Secret Empires, and reported on previously, it shows that Joe Biden in 2018 knew plenty about his son's business dealings, all of which involved foreign nations in which the elder Biden was simultaneously serving as the US's most important diplomatic presence.

Moreover, it tracks with the words of an eyewitness, namely Hunter himself, who told the New Yorker in 2019 that he discussed Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas producer, with his father as far back as December 2015 while Hunter sat on Burisma's board of directors, as USA TODAY reported in September of 2019.

Around the time of the 2015 conversation, Joe Biden was preparing for a trip to Ukraine and the Obama administration special envoy had raised the issue with the Vice President, according to the article. Hunter Biden told the New Yorker he and his father spoke about Burisma just once.

"Dad said, 'I hope you know what you're doing,'" Hunter told the New Yorker. "And I said, 'I do,'" Hunter said. His father's presidential campaign declined to comment.

Joe Biden would go on, as candidate and then as president, to continue to deny, then backpedal, on whether Joe had knowledge of what his son was doing overseas. For those who would not be convinced by what I disclosed in Secret Empires, published in April 2018 and five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list -- for those who would not be convinced by Hunter's own words that he had in fact discussed his overseas business interests with his father -- there is now the direct, recorded voice of Joe Biden himself, telling his son in 2018 that he was "in the clear" on at least one of these deals.

He denied any of this, categorically, throughout the 2020 campaign. But, as Gordon Chang agreed in a recent interview, there it is.

Some may be tempted to chalk this up to past indiscretions or even as a father's natural protectiveness for his own son. But none of this is really "past," and given the investigations ongoing into Hunter's business dealings it is hard to see that it provided much protection to him at all. But the lies did protect Joe Biden's "viability" as a candidate against President Donald Trump and defused an issue that led to Trump's impeachment by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives over his efforts to coax Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into investigating the matter from his own perspective.

But the issue remains red-hot because there is still so much at stake in US-China diplomatic and trade relations that requires a US president to prioritize American interests above those of China... or of himself.

In an interview with Jason Chaffetz on the Fox News show "Sunday Futures," I described the Biden administration's policy toward China as "A retreat by 1,000 small steps."

• Thanks to a Treasury Department "interpretation," Americans can still own stock in companies that were placed on a blacklist by the Trump administration because of their direct ties to the Chinese military.
• Thanks to the Biden administration, the "China Initiative" at the Department of Justice to crack down on China's attempts to acquire or steal American technology has been discontinued.
• Thanks to the Biden administration's "green energy" enthusiasm, tariffs on solar panels made by Asian countries who are assembling or repackaging solar panels made in China were removed.
• The Biden administration has also signaled its intention to remove or lift other tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Chinese products. It has also been friendlier toward Chinese companies such as Huawei and ByteDance (owner of TikTok) in recent weeks.

And all of this has been done with zero concessions from the Chinese government on any of the outstanding diplomatic, military, strategic, health or trade issues that so concern most Americans.

This story is shocking, threatens national security, and should dominate the attention of the major newspapers and news networks because of the damning implications. Because the Biden family has been so deeply involved and so vehemently denied their involvement with Chinese business, the next question is as inescapable as the first: Does the flow of money to the Biden family from China influence the foreign policy of the United States?

Based on a mountain of documentary evidence topped with one short, intimate voicemail message, the answer appears clearer than ever.

Peter Schweizer, President of the Governmental Accountability Institute, is a Gatestone Institute Distinguished Senior Fellow and author of the new book, Red Handed: How American Elites are Helping China Win.