Thirty-one million dollars in deals flowed to members of President Joe Biden’s family from China, all involving individuals tied directly to Chinese intelligence. These staggering sums, and the troubling connections they suggest between the Chinese regime and the present First Family, shocked many Americans who might have supposed that – however corrupt our own politicians and elites might be – at least they were just feathering their own nests, not selling out to America’s enemies. Well, maybe not.
Americans are waking up to the threats posed by China, and to
the dealings of elites here at home who have enriched themselves on Chinese money and favors. Americans are hungry for the truth about China’s mastery at wrapping the most powerful figures in American universities, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street around their fingers, I believe this growing outrage has blessed my own new book, Red Handed, which I’m grateful to say has held to the top spot on the New York Times Best Seller list for three straight weeks.
My research team at the Government Accountability Institute and I have been investigating the Biden family’s ties to Beijing since 2017, and it remains a deep well. But other key figures in the Biden administration have their own histories with China, and their own lucrative arrangements.
The story includes figures from the worlds of politics and two of its offshoots – the army of international business consultants who help Chinese business interests, and academic institutions hungry for donations and willing to tolerate a measure of Chinese propaganda on campus.
These, too, are among the “red handed.”
Antony “Tony” Blinken is today the Secretary of State but
has a long association with Biden. Blinken served as an advisor to Vice President Biden. In chapter 2 of Red Handed, we reveal that he reportedly played a central role in denying asylum to a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party official who was hoping to defect.”[1] Following the 2016 election, Blinken served as managing director of the brand-new Penn Biden Center, a part of the U. of Pennsylvania but based in Washington, DC. The center was created and named for Joe Biden, but the money flowed to the university from China following its creation.
According to our book, “…after the Biden Center’s announcement that it was opening… donations from the Chinese mainland to Penn almost tripled. In the three years before the announcement, the university received around $15 million. In the three years after, the total was close to $40 million. The latter number is $60 million from China if you include contracts.”[2] Many of those donations came from individuals or entities connected to the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese state.
While Blinken was running the Penn Biden Center, he also maintained his own private consultancy, known as WestExec Advisors.[3] Setting up such consultancies is a common career move for out-of-power diplomats. The firm today boasts on its website that “WestExec Advisors brings the Situation Room to the Board Room,” and its roster includes former diplomats, members of the military and other senior advisors. Red-Handed details one of that firm’s roles: “helping ‘US research universities’ navigate problems arising from receiving research grants from the US Department of Defense while also taking foreign money from China.”[4]
Another longtime Biden aide, Steve Ricchetti, would briefly succeed
Blinken at the Penn Biden Center, but is today a Counselor to the President in the White House. Ricchetti has been called “the Biden whisperer” for his ability to influence his longtime boss, and served as chairman of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Ricchetti’s history in politics and lobbying activity go back to Bill Clinton’s administration. In 2000, Ricchetti was appointed to the Clinton administration’s lobbying team which was tasked with encouraging Congress to vote for China’s entry into the WTO. In periods when Democrats were out of the White House, Ricchetti was a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, among other clients. His brother, Jeff, is also a lobbyist who lobbied the National Security Council on behalf of General Motors on “issues related to China,” according to a CNBC report.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield is our current ambassador to the United
Nations. She is a career diplomat who served all over the world. Before joining the administration, she worked for the Albright Stonebridge Group. This is another business consultancy group, formed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright after she left Bill Clinton’s administration. The firm’s China practice is its largest.
According to Red Handed, in 2019, Thomas-Greenfield gave a speech at the Chinese government funded-Confucius Institute at Savannah State University in Georgia. In it, she praised China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Africa and the role that the regime was playing in Africa. She declared that the United States and China could work in Africa together on “shared values of peace, prosperity, sustained economic growth and development, and a firm commitment to good governance, and gender equity, and the rule of law.” At her confirmation hearings in January 2021, she was challenged by Senate Republicans about that speech and conceded it was “a huge mistake.”
Jake Sullivan is the current National Security Advisor to President Biden. Before joining the administration, he was a paid fellow at the Paul Tsai
Center at Yale University, funded by Joe Tsai, the co-founder of the powerful Chinese tech company, Alibaba.
A Department of Education investigation into Joe Tsai’s donation to Yale later revealed that Yale did not list hundreds of millions of dollars in overseas gifts it received, many coming from mainland China. To obscure the foreign source of the donations, Tsai funneled the donations through a web of shell nonprofit companies to avoid the disclosures required by law, which we detail in the book.
According to Red Handed, “The Paul Tsai China Center often echoes the positive views that the funder has of the Beijing regime. This happens partly because the Tsai Center often hosts visiting scholars and former government officials from Beijing, connected to both the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese military.”
The center’s scholars have produced material that is soft on China, including pieces that minimized the importance of the Chinese “social credit” system, commended China for its governmental transparency, and expressed tacit support for China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Jeff Prescott also worked at the Tsai Center, as Jake Sullivan’s
deputy director, before his own nomination by Biden to Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s deputy at the UN. Prescott served previously as Special Assistant to President Obama and Senior Director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf States on the National Security Council, and as Vice President Biden’s Deputy National Security Advisor. Prescott had a visiting professorship at Fudan University in Shanghai where he taught on human rights.
Frankly, this is all just the surface. I have said several times that this is the scariest investigation I have ever done, and it is. But when I see the reaction the book is getting, I take heart that Americans are waking up and fed up. They want these patterns of behavior called out.
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[1] Red Handed – How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, Chap. 2: The Bidens
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
