Balding says he’s no supporter of Donald Trump, but the connections noted in the Typhoon report should concern anyone worried about foreign influence in the US, especially if Hunter’s father becomes president:

It is not simply the state money that should cause concern but the structures and deals that took place. Most investment in specific projects came from state owned entities and flowed into state backed projects or enterprises. Even the deals speak to the worst of cronyism. The Hunter Biden investment firm share of a copper mine in the Congo was guaranteed with assets put at risk by the larger copper company to ensure deal flow to Hunter’s firm.

In another instance, Bank of China working on an IPO in Hong Kong gave its share allocation to the BHR investment partnership. They were able to do this because even though the Hunter Biden firm completed no notable work on the IPO, it is counted as a subsidiary of the Bank of China. The Hunter Biden Chinese investment partnership is literally invested in by the Chinese state and a subsidiary of the Bank of China owned by the Chinese Ministry of Finance.

The entire arrangement speaks to Chinese state interests. Meetings were held at locations that in China speak to the welcoming of foreign dignitaries or state to state relations. The Chinese organizations surrounding Hunter Biden are known intelligence and influence operatives to the United States government. The innocuous names like Chinese People’s Institute for Foreign Affairs exist to “…carry out government-directed policies and cooperative initiatives with influential foreigners without being perceived as a formal part of the Chinese government.”

Interestingly the CPIFA is under the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When the investment partnership was struck in 2013, the Minister of Foreign Affairs was Yang Jiechi. Yang would have been very familiar with Hunter Biden from his days in Washington as the Chinese Ambassador to the United States from 2001 to 2005 during which he met regularly with Joe Biden chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Today the same individual who oversaw institutions helping shepherd Hunter’s investment partnership as the Minister of Foreign Affairs is Xi Jinping’s right hand man on foreign affairs and member of the powerful Politburo.

Most worrying is the financial leverage this gives the Chinese state over a direct member of the Biden family. Despite the widely reported $1-1.5 billion of investment the reality is likely much higher. A co-founder of the investment firm reports the total assets under management as $6.5 billion. While this number cannot be completely replicated, given that two deal alone were worth in excess of $1.6 billion this number is not unrealistic at all. A 2% annual fee on assets under management would generate $130 million annually. Add in the 20% fee on capital gains the firm would recognize and it is not difficult to see Hunter’s stake being worth in excess of $50 million.

What makes this different from yesterday’s statement from Tony Bobulinksi and the reporting from the New York Post last week is that this report goes back to when Joe Biden was vice president. The Bobulinski deal took shape in 2017, after Biden père had left office. Even if Joe had explicitly taken part in the Sinohawk partnership with CEFC China Energy, there would have been no legal or ethical issues in play at that time. The clandestine nature of these negotiations (covered well by Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal) shows that the principals certainly acted like it was a problem, likely because they knew “the big guy” would run for president, and because the deal itself looked like a payoff scheme.

The Typhoon report, however, takes Hunter’s connections back four years earlier at a minimum, with threads going back as far as 2011. Its summary lists ten findings, some of which are attributed to anonymous sourcing, but only two of which involve Joe Biden:

1. Joe Biden’s compromising partnership with the Communist Party of China runs via Yang Jiechi (CPC’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission). YANG met frequently with BIDEN during his tenure at the Chinese embassy in Washington.
2. Hunter Biden’s 2013 Bohai Harvest Rosemont investment partnership was set-up by Ministry of Foreign Affairs institutions who are tasked with garnering influence with foreign leaders during YANG’s tenure as Foreign Minister.
3. HUNTER has a direct line to the Politburo, according to SOURCE A, a senior finance professional in China.
4. Michael Lin, a Taiwanese national now detained in China, brokered the BHR partnership and partners with MOFA foreign influence organizations.
5. LIN is a POI for his work on behalf of China, as confirmed by SOURCE B and SOURCE C (at two separate national intelligence agencies).
6. BHR is a state managed operation. Leading shareholder in BHR is a Bank of China which lists BHR as a subsidiary and BHR’s partners are SOEs that funnel revenue/assets to BHR.
7. HUNTER continues to hold 10% in BHR. He visited China in 2010 and met with major Chinese government financial companies that would later back BHR.
8. HUNTER’s BHR stake (purchased for $400,000) is now likely be worth approx. $50 million (fees and capital appreciation based on BHR’s $6.5 billion AUM as stated by Michael Lin).
9. HUNTER also did business with Chinese tycoons linked with the Chinese military and against the interests of US national security.
10. BIDEN’s foreign policy stance towards China (formerly hawkish), turned positive despite China’s country’s rising geopolitical assertiveness.

Let’s assume that the Typhoon report’s claims are entirely legitimate, for the sake of argument at the moment and also to play devil’s advocate. This still is more about influence operations by one of the US’ most significant geopolitical foes than it is about specific corruption from Joe Biden. Points one and ten can be explained in any number of ways. As VP, Biden met with lots of different diplomats, not all of whom are/were particularly savory, but are part of the normal diplomatic exchanges between governments. (Think of meetings or conversations Sergei Kislyak and Jeff Sessions and Michael Flynn, for instance.)

Neither would it be unusual for Biden to warm up to China at a point in time when both governments were encouraging trade — although it was certainly a bad idea. That’s especially true after the Obama administration discovered that China was conducting major hacks of US government computer systems, such as the Office of Professional Management and other Pentagon systems. That should have snapped the US out of its haze in regard to the threat posed by China and its outright hostility toward the US, but it didn’t. Did Hunter’s business ties have something to do with that? Typhoon only correlates Biden’s purported shift, while also tacitly admitting it began in the latter part of the Bush 43 administration, which was also rather dovish on China.

The value of the Typhoon report is in its road map for investigators. If the FBI or relevant congressional committees want to dive into this issue, Typhoon has at least laid out all of the public data on the Bidens’ potential financial connections to the CCP regime in Beijing. The first task will be to independently verify Typhoon’s findings, and then determine what they mean. It will take further corroboration and more investigation to determine whether Joe Biden was corrupt at the time he served as VP, just how compromised Hunter Biden really is, and perhaps whether all of these financial connections got reported properly. This might even be another FARA case in regard to Hunter, based on the theories used to prosecute Paul Manafort and Rick Gates.

The big question is whether it prompts any investigation at all. Most national media outlets have little interest in delving into the Biden family’s finances, as they proved this week. If Biden wins the election, they’ll have even less interest in it, and the congressional committees controlled by Democrats won’t have any interest in doing so. So basically … don’t hold your breath.