Wall Street Journal : No Evidence of a Role for Joe Biden in Bobulinski Venture

Here is the Wall Street Journal article

An   ex - business   partner   of   Hunter   Biden, in a news conference organized by the Trump campaign, alleged that former Vice President Joe Biden was part of discussions around his son's efforts to form an investment   venture   with a Chinese oil company.

The Biden campaign denied Joe Biden had any involvement in the   venture   or stood to gain by it.

In a statement to reporters Thursday, Anthony Bobulinski said that in 2017   Hunter   Biden consulted his   father   about   a planned   venture   with Chinese oil company CEFC China Energy Co. to invest in the U.S. and elsewhere. Mr. Bobulinski was also a   partner .

The   venture —set up in 2017 after Mr. Biden left the vice presidency and before his presidential campaign—never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals, according to people familiar with the matter. Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden.

"Joe Biden has never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any overseas business whatsoever. He has never held stock in any such business arrangements nor has any family member or any other person ever held stock for him," said Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates in a statement.

Election 2020

Mr. Bobulinski said that he was rankled by Joe Biden's public statements that he never discussed the international business activities of   Hunter   and other family members. He also cited nearly $5 million in payments that a Senate Republican report last month said CEFC made to   Hunter   Biden's law firm as another reason to come forward.

Mr. Bobulinski said he took part in a meeting with   Hunter , Joe Biden and Joe Biden's brother James Biden in Los Angeles in 2017 when they discussed "the Biden family business plans with the Chinese, of which [Joe Biden] was plainly familiar at least at a high level."

A Biden campaign spokesman didn't immediately respond to a question   about   the alleged meeting with Mr. Bobulinski. James Biden and an attorney for   Hunter   Biden didn't respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Bobulinski, who was a guest of Mr. Trump's at Thursday's debate in Nashville, didn't take any questions after his statement or provide further details on any remarks made by the former vice president. He displayed three phones which he said contained information that he would hand over to the FBI. He also said he would provide information to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee led by Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) on Friday.

The   venture   with CEFC, known as SinoHawk Holdings, was half held by Mr. Bobulinski, who served as chief executive, and four other   partners — Hunter   and James Biden; Rob Walker, a former Clinton administration official; and James Gilliar, a British national—according to the corporate documents reviewed by the Journal.

Text messages and emails related to the   venture   that were provided to the Journal by Mr. Bobulinski, mainly from the spring and summer of 2017, don't show either   Hunter   Biden or James Biden discussing a role for Joe Biden in the   venture .

Mr. Gilliar told the Journal: "I would like to clear up any speculation that former Vice President Biden was involved with the 2017 discussions   about   our potential business structure. I am unaware of any involvement at anytime of the former Vice President. The activity in question never delivered any project revenue."

In the correspondence provided by Mr. Bobulinski, an email he received from Mr. Gilliar in May 2017 proposed a possible equity arrangement for the five   partners . The email references "10 held by H for the big guy?" Mr. Bobulinski said the "H" referred to   Hunter   Biden and the "big guy" was Joe Biden. Mr. Gilliar didn't respond to a request for comment, nor did the other   partner   in the   venture , Mr. Walker.

SinoHawk was created to find investments in the U.S. and elsewhere for CEFC, relying in part on James and   Hunter   Biden, as well as their   partners , to make introductions to politicians and influential figures, according to company strategy documents.

Mr. Bobulinski, 48, who said he served four years in the Navy, leaving with the rank of lieutenant, said through his business   ventures   he met Mr. Gilliar, who brought him into the proposed   venture .

CEFC, whose founder and chairman had a background in military intelligence, was in the midst of a rapid, well-funded global expansion that often made investments that dovetailed with the priorities of China's president, Xi Jinping, and his global program to build infrastructure. Its founder, Ye Jianming, was put under investigation in China in 2018 and hasn't been seen in public since. CEFC has gone into receivership and been put under control of the Shanghai government.

Andrew Restuccia contributed to this article.

wsj

The venture didnt make any money and Joe Biden had no involvement, per the Wall Street Journal , one of America's premier conservative news publications. 

Time to move on. 

washingtonpost

In some corners of the universe, it was a bombshell. President Trump would be bringing none other than Tony   Bobulinski   to the second and final presidential debate on Thursday night, a decision sure to shake the foundation of the presidential race.

In most corners of the universe, though, the response was a bit different: Tony Who-now?

There are two patterns that have so far defined Trump's effort to win a second term. The first is that his campaign seizes upon particular themes and shakes them ferociously like a dog that's nabbed a squirrel. The second is that these themes often overlap with the obsessions of conservative media, both because they often emerge from that world and because they often inform it.

So we've seen these waves. Former vice president Joe Biden is addled! — which lasted until the Democratic convention, and it was pretty obvious that Biden was perfectly capable of offering an extensive rejection of Trump's first term in office. Leftist thugs are burning down cities! — an argument that evaporated along with the summer's rash of protests and, one assumes, polling showing that it wasn't doing any good.

The most recent obsession in Trump's universe is Biden's son Hunter. Hunter Biden's rocky background is no secret, with Joe Biden himself having addressed it on several occasions. Last week, though, the New York Post began running a series of articles leveraging material obtained by Trump's attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani. The initial focus was on re-litigating the events that led to Trump's impeachment last year, though much of the attention was instead focused on the odd provenance of the material. In reporting from the New York Post and Fox News since, the focus has expanded outward to include other aspects of Hunter Biden's business record.

That's where Mr.   Bobulinski   enters. A former business partner of Hunter Biden's, he apparently became frustrated at learning that the former vice president's son had made a business deal in China without him. He's since decided to help Giuliani and Senate Republicans dig through as much of Hunter Biden's business history as possible. His presence at the debate, it appears, is either meant to rattle Joe Biden for unclear reasons — or simply to inject more energy into Trump's base, many of whom have been tracking the expanding intricacies of the Hunter Biden plotline with great enthusiasm.

It is, for example, a staple of Fox News's coverage, with Hunter Biden's name arising repeatedly on both the main network and its sister, Fox Business. It's barely been mentioned on CNN or MSNBC.

As with Trump's fixation on crime and violent protests (the vast majority of which were, in fact, not violent), this obsessive consideration of the actions of Hunter has not had any significant effect on Joe. The first New York Post story came out on Oct. 14. Since then, Biden's national lead in FiveThirtyEight's average of polls has fallen a statistically insignificant 0.3 points. In some swing states, the lead has narrowed a bit more, but not demonstrably because voters there are particularly worried about what Biden's son was doing.

We've included the late trend from 2016 polling because it's essential that Trump begin eating into Biden's leads in most of these states if he is to have a chance at a second term. Each day that goes by with Trump throwing more energy into the Hunter Biden plotline (or feuds with CBS News journalists) is a day on which more voters cast ballots and on which the opportunity for Trump to close that gap escapes.

After all, it's not just that the polls narrowed nationally and in, say, Pennsylvania. It's that they narrowed from a much wider deficit than in 2016. Earlier this week, we looked at how the current race (solid lines) compares with 2016 (dotted lines) on three metrics: overall support, the margin between the two candidates and the pool of undecided voters. The graph below (which updates automatically) shows the comparison. There are fewer undecided voters who might shift to Trump this year, and Biden's over 50 percent in many places.

Yes, the national gap narrowed — but Biden's still up by about 10 points.

(These data come from FiveThirtyEight's averages.)

Trump's defenders will argue that voters don't know   Bobulinski 's name because most news outlets haven't dived deep enough into the story to cover that level of nuance. Which is largely true, in part because most news outlets (including, at first, Fox News) were unwilling to cover the initial allegations reported by the New York Post given the inability to access and verify the material.

We've seen similar patterns play out repeatedly over the past four years. Conservative media seizes upon an allegation and plays it out to the millionth degree, isolating specific capillaries as smoking guns. Eventually, more reporting reveals that the allegations were overblown, misrepresented or false, and everyone moves on the next thing.

A great, albeit accidental, example came from the Trump campaign's own rapid response team on Wednesday night. It wanted to slam the press for not covering the Hunter Biden story, so it dug into its archives for a GIF of Leslie Nielsen in "The Naked Gun" trying to disperse a crowd watching a fireworks factory explode.

The only problem was that, instead of simply embedding the GIF, they embedded the entire tweet from which it came. This tweet:

The "unmasking scandal" was a staple of both Trump and his allies for years. The details don't matter much here, but the upshot is simple: A probe commissioned by Attorney General William P. Barr determined there wasn't any scandal at all.

In other words, the Trump campaign was criticizing the media for not covering something the way it wanted — but the example it used was one in which the way it wanted the incident covered was wrong.

The account quickly realized its mistake and tweeted this:

This is what they hope will define the last 12 days of this race. This is why   Bobulinski   is going to the debate.

Whether the result is any different from "unmasking," either in disparaging Biden or moving the polls, remains to be seen.

The   venture —set up in 2017 after Mr. Biden left the vice presidency and before his presidential campaign—never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals, according to people familiar with the matter. Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden.