‘Biden was ‘the Brand’ being sold’

WASHINGTON — A former Biden family business associate-turned-whistleblower alleged in explosive testimony before House impeachment probers Tuesday that the president was “the Brand” being sold by relatives in their lucrative dealings in countries such as China and Ukraine.

Tony Bobulinski — a former Navy officer who worked with first son Hunter Biden and first brother James on a venture with CEFC China Energy — is considered one of the Republicans’ best hopes in scoring damning new details confirming the president’s ties to his relatives’ Chinese government-linked relationships.

“For nearly four years, I have tried to tell the American people the truth about serious corruption at the very top of their government,” Bobulinski said in opening statements to House probers from both sides of the political aisle in the closed-door session.

“The Biden family business was Joe Biden, period,” Bobulinksi alleged.

“It is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the Brand’ being
sold by the Biden family.

“The Chinese Communist Party through its surrogate, China Energy Company Limited, or ‘CEFC’– a CCP-linked Chinese energy conglomerate – successfully sought to infiltrate and compromise Joe Biden and the Obama-Biden White House.

“Joe Biden was aware of the CEFC transaction, enabled it, and had a constitutional responsibility and obligation to the American people to shut it down before it began,” Bobulinski said.

CEFC, a since-defunct reputed cog in Beijing’s “Belt and Road” foreign influence campaign, paid Hunter and James Biden more than $7 million in 2017 and 2018 for largely unknown business services, according to reports from congressional Republicans.

A different former Biden family associate, Rob Walker, testified on Jan. 26 that the Bidens’ business relationship with CEFC began in 2015 when Joe Biden was still vice president and that Joe Biden himself attended a meeting at the Four Seasons hotel in or around March 2017 with CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming, who has since gone missing in China during corruption allegations.

Walker disbursed an initial tranche of more than $1 million to the Bidens beginning in March 2017 — after Joe Biden left office as vice president that January — and did not dispute in his deposition new evidence of emails in March 2016 — while Joe Biden was VP — between himself, Hunter Biden and CEFC officials.

Bobulinski is expected to face tense grilling from Democrats in the closed-door session after infuriating them in 2020 by sandbagging Biden moments before his final debate against then-President Donald Trump.

At the time, Bobulinski publicly corroborated details from Hunter’s abandoned laptop about Hunter and first brother James Biden’s lucrative relationship with CEFC China Energy.

READ BOBULINSKI’S OPENING STATEMENT

CEFC transferred $5.1 million to bank accounts linked to Hunter and James Biden within 10 days of Hunter writing to a China-based CEFC associate he was “sitting here with my father” and warning of retribution if an agreed-upon deal was not executed.

Photos from Hunter’s laptop show that he was indeed at his dad’s Delaware home that day, though IRS whistleblowers who investigated the first son for failing to pay taxes on overseas income say they were blocked from a collection of cellphone geolocation data.

Bobulinski previously said that he discussed the CEFC venture with Joe Biden twice in May 2017.

Democrats are expected to attempt to flip the script by depicting Bobulinski as an embittered jilted former partner after he alleged that Hunter cheated him in the venture.