Show Notes
On this episode of The Drill Down, Eric Eggers takes over the pilot’s seat and welcomes Seamus Bruner, Director of Research here at the Government Accountability Institute. Seamus is an investigative journalist and the author of two books on corruption within the FBI and other parts of the federal government, and has been one of GAI’s biggest investigative stars since our founding in 2012. Seamus joins the podcast today to talk about his research on Chinese government money flowing to the “Biden Center” at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
The money flow to the Biden family, and in particular to Hunter Biden, is now under multiple investigations by Congress and the Department of Justice. Seamus Bruner has been on top of this story since 2017 and his contributions were integral to Peter Schweizer’s books Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption, both of which revealed the deep ties between the Bidens and Chinese business interests who are directly tied to the CCP and to Chinese intelligence. Six years later, he is still digging.
Last week, Seamus and GAI researcher Jedd McFatter revealed that Chinese government money was contributed to the University of Delaware, where a second “Biden Institute” had been established by Hunter Biden around the time that his father Joe left the vice president’s office in 2017.
“The University of Delaware got $6.7 million dollars after Joe Biden set up his institute. They had never gotten any Chinese cash before. The thing that really sets the U. of Delaware apart here is this that some of this money came directly from the Chinese government, as opposed to the money that went to the Penn Biden center which came from secret Chinese donors. We asked the universities to tell us their names, and they refused to respond,” Seamus explains.
He continued: “The really shocking thing is that the (publicly funded) U. of Delaware checked a box [on a foreign donations disclosure form] that asks, ‘Is this a foreign government?’ and they checked yes.”
Seamus and Jedd’s reporting corroborated this with emails they have from Hunter’s laptop, which document the planning by Hunter in an email thread titled “JRB Future Memo” all the way back in 2010. (See below)
As they reported, “Hunter Biden met with UD’s incoming president, Dr. Dennis Assanis, as Hunter and his business associates were making plans to create a “stage” to promote the “Biden brand,” emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop show. Other emails on the laptop indicate that Hunter and his business associates were concerned about boosting Joe’s “future earnings potential,” while Joe was still the vice president. Another email from 2017 between Hunter and his father details the planning for the center’s opening.
Seamus and Eric are both longtime veterans of GAI and their discussion on the show compared the schemes of the Bidens for their “brand” with an earlier story that GAI also uncovered – the setup and money flow of millions of dollars to the Bill and Hillary Clinton Foundation from business interests with matters before the US State Department while Hillary was running the State Department. As part of their research for that book, Clinton Cash, Eric even traveled to Haiti.
Eric points out that the emails from the laptop detail how the Bidens wanted to “operate very much like the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. We (at GAI) see the Clinton Foundation as a scandal-plagued embarrassment. The Bidens looked at the Clinton Foundation and said, ‘Hey! That’s a great idea! We want more of that!’”
Seamus’s most recent book, co-written with John Solomon of JustTheNews, was called Fallout and detailed the story of Uranium One and its sale to the Russian state nuclear agency, Rosatom. His first book, entitled Compromised, detailed collusion by top officials at the FBI and the Justice department against the public trust.
