WASHINGTON — When the Justice Department announced last week that a man Republicans considered a witness against the Biden family was actually a fugitive on the run, Republicans said the criminal charges against him only bolstered their case against the Bidens.
Prosecutors said Gal Luft failed to register as a foreign agent while working for the China Energy Fund Committee, a nongovernmental organization linked to a Chinese energy conglomerate with government ties.
“They indicted him for being an unregistered foreign agent. Well, that’s what Hunter Biden was doing for the same company,” House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said on Fox News last week.
The Foreign Agent Registration Act, or FARA, requires anyone doing political, public relations or lobbying work on behalf of a foreign individual, organization or government to register with the Justice Department, which makes the information public as a means of combating covert foreign influence in domestic politics.
Luft allegedly worked with the China-linked organization, known as CEFC, to recruit and pay a “former high-ranking U.S. government official,” apparently former CIA Director James Woolsey, to spread pro-China propaganda in the U.S. and influence policy.
When the Trump campaign announced Woolsey would serve as an adviser in 2016, Luft triumphantly emailed an associate, “We nailed it!” Other emails quoted in the indictment show Luft acting as a ghostwriter for Woolsey’s public remarks and even his private correspondence to another unnamed Trump adviser.
As Republicans have been correctly pointing out, Hunter Biden also worked with CEFC. He told the New Yorker in 2019 that he tried to help the company find investment opportunities in the U.S., including a potential deal for CEFC to invest in a Louisiana liquefied natural gas project. The deal never materialized.
In less than two years, the younger Biden received several million dollars from CEFC before one of his main contacts there was indicted for foreign bribery and the other was detained by the Chinese government. (He wasn’t accused of wrongdoing in either case.)
While it’s clear Hunter Biden had a working relationship with the same foreign principals Luft did, it’s less clear that Biden engaged in the kind of political activity that would require him to register as a foreign agent. His work for the company didn’t include any public advocacy, and there’s only circumstantial evidence of a behind-the-scenes lobbying effort.
“I have yet to see anything he’s done that would actually qualify as political activity,” said Benjamin Freeman, a research fellow with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a nonpartisan think tank founded in 2019 to advocate for restraint in U.S. foreign policy. “Being an adviser or being a consultant to a foreign entity, in itself, is not something that would trigger FARA registration.”
The Louisiana natural gas project, Freeman said, would likely count as the kind of commercial activity that’s exempt from reporting under the foreign agent statute.
Hunter Biden at a Fourth of July barbecue and concert on the South Lawn of the White House on July 4, 2023.
Hunter Biden also served on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma. Republicans have dubiously claimed the Burisma connection prompted then-Vice President Joe Biden to push for the ouster of Ukraine’s prosecutor in 2016 in order to protect the company. Former President Donald Trump tried to pressure the Ukrainian government into announcing a sham investigation into the Bidens in 2019, and Republicans are still pursuing the case to this day.
State Department officials have said in sworn testimony during impeachment proceedings that the elder Biden acted on the consensus of the foreign policy establishment in regard to the Ukrainian prosecutor, and that he wasn’t bailing out his son. They also said, however, that the younger Biden’s presence on a foreign company’s board was inappropriate and made it more difficult for them to call out conflicts of interest in other countries.
Republicans have pointed to emails found on a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned to a repair shop that suggest he may have tried to set up meetings between business associates and government officials, including his father, when Joe Biden served as vice president.
In a complaint filed with the Justice Department in 2020, the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a conservative nonprofit, alleged Hunter Biden should have registered as a foreign agent, citing, among other things, an email from a Burisma executive thanking him for arranging a meeting with his father in 2015. Others present for the meeting told The New York Times it was a fleeting encounter at a charity dinner.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) also asked the Justice Department to look into Hunter Biden’s compliance with registration requirements that year with a letter focused more on CEFC’s intentions than Biden’s actions. “When the available evidence is taken as a whole, it is clear that CEFC intended to make inroads in the United States for the purpose of expanding its business and used Hunter Biden and his business associates to help effectuate that intent,” Grassley wrote.
Federal prosecutors have been investigating Hunter Biden for years, and last month announced he would plead guilty to misdemeanors for failing to pay taxes. Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a holdover from the Trump administration, has overseen the case and said that it’s still ongoing.
Paul Kamenar, legal counsel for the NLPC, said that if there’s not already enough evidence to indict Hunter Biden for failing to register as a foreign agent, then Weiss should at least be trying to build such a case.
“There is certainly enough information, if not to indict Hunter on a FARA violation, there’s certainly enough for Weiss to subpoena the people involved in arranging these meetings,” Kamenar told HuffPost.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that the matter is in Weiss’s hands and that he has probably already considered unregistered foreign agent charges.
“We have a system of justice, and Hunter Biden has been heavily investigated, he’s been heavily scrutinized, and there are charges being brought against him,” Raskin said last week.
It’s possible that Hunter Biden did not actually do a ton of work for the foreign nationals that paid him. He has said he was in the “throes of addiction” to alcohol and cocaine following his brother’s death and the dissolution of his first marriage. He reportedly stopped responding to emails from his main contact at Burisma.
In response to Luft’s indictment, Comer asked the FBI to hand over its documents memorializing its interviews with Luft, who has claimed to have derogatory information about the Bidens. (In addition to being an unregistered foreign agent, Luft stands accused of lying to investigators and illegally arranging international weapon sales.)
While Comer has not shied from saying he believes the Biden family is guilty of multiple federal crimes, he has also not shied from admitting he doesn’t really know what the younger Biden actually did in return for his foreign compensation.
“He has received millions and millions of dollars from foreign nationals in some of the worst countries on our planet,” Comer said on Fox News earlier this month. “Yet, we don’t know one single thing he did to earn the money.”
