‘Missing’ Biden corruption witness Dr. Gal Luft hit with federal charges

Dr. Gal Luft, a key figure in House Republicans’ investigation of the Biden family’s international influence-peddling, faces federal charges of arms trafficking, operating as an unregistered lobbyist for China, and conspiring to flout US sanctions on Iran, according to a Manhattan indictment unsealed Monday.

Prosecutors say Luft, 57, a dual US-Israeli citizen who was arrested in Cyprus this past February and went on the run after being released on bail, agreed in 2015 to let former Hong Kong official Patrick Ho send $350,000 each year to Luft’s think tank, the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. In return, the indictment said, Luft agreed to “recruit and ‘educate’ a former high-ranking US official to “make public statements … which were in the interest of China.”

The official is not named in the indictment, but details about his work correspond with former CIA Director James Woolsey.

Ho similarly is not named in the indictment, but details in the court document match up to incidents in Ho’s life — most notably his arrest by US officials in November 2017 on bribery and money-laundering charges.

Luft has claimed the criminal case is a political hit job meant to stop him from testifying to the House Oversight Committee that the first family received payments from individuals with ties to Chinese military intelligence and that the Bidens had an FBI mole who shared classified information with their benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC.

“I, who volunteered to inform the US government about a potential security breach and about compromising information about a man vying to be the next president, am now being hunted by the very same people who I informed — and may have to live on the run for the rest of my life on the run,” Luft told The Post in a video filmed in an undisclosed location last week.

“Why am I being indicted … for ghostwriting an innocuous article for which I received no payment, let alone from a foreign government, when the mother of all FARA cases, the Bidens’ systemic influence-peddling on behalf of foreign governments, for which they raked [in] millions, goes unpunished?” Luft asked in his video last week.