When issuing the “full and unconditional” pardon of his son, U.S. President Joe Biden asserted that Hunter Biden was “selectively and unfairly prosecuted” and that he “was singled out only because he is my son.” The Trump team should reply that Hunter Biden has been “singled out” not for prosecution but for an extensive multi-year cover-up by the Biden administration of crimes he committed when his father was vice president and when he was considering a 2020 presidential candidacy.
The first whistleblower to report about corrupt conduct relating to China by Hunter Biden and the Biden family was Gal Luft, a dual national of Israel and the United States, who provided details more than five years ago. Rather than probing those disclosures, politically weaponized federal officials covered them up and targeted Luft. He is now imprisoned in a Cyprus jail on a dubious arrest-and-extradition application made by the Biden administration.
In a meeting held in Brussels on March 28, 2019, Luft told two federal prosecutors and four FBI agents that between 2014 and 2017, Hunter Biden had been paid at least $9 million by Ye Jianming, chairman of CEFC China Energy Company. Luft also reported that Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden, were paid monthly retainers of $100,000 and $65,000 by Ye. The FBI’s summary of the meeting contains Luft’s description of relations between Ye and the Biden family, including a report of a meeting Ye held with both father and son “at the end of 2016 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington.”
Luft was indicted on federal arms charges in November 2022, right before the midterm elections, when polls were predicting that Republicans would win at least the U.S. House of Representatives, and with it, its investigative authority.
Luft says the charges are bogus. Some of them included in the 2022 indictment are barred by a statute of limitations. If the allegations were valid, why would federal prosecutors have delayed filing charges for so long? The 2022 indictment accuses Luft of lying to the FBI during their meeting in Brussels about his own culpability. Nowhere does it allege that the information he gave to the federal officials about the Bidens was untrue. Claims of false allegations about Biden-family crimes recently resulted in an indictment and guilty plea by Alexander Smirnov, but no comparable charge has ever been made against Luft.
It is well-known that Luft resides in Israel with his family, but Biden’s Justice and State departments did not seek his extradition from Israel. They waited several months after returning an indictment in 2022 against him, deferring a request for extradition until he left Israel for a trip to Cyprus. They then made the request to Cyprus officials who they were confident from past experiences would, unlike the Israeli authorities, immediately arrest, imprison and thereby silence him.
Miranda Devine of the New York Post reported that the Biden-appointed U.S. ambassador to Cyprus made Herculean efforts to have the Cypriot court continue to silence Luft by denying his request for release on bail. At the same time, U.S. officials sought repeatedly to speak with him while he was in prison without his lawyer present, a violation of Luft’s constitutional rights.
Rather than following up on Luft’s leads in 2019—when Biden was on the cusp of a presidential candidacy—federal prosecutors chose to conceal and cover up offenses by the Biden family and ultimately file spurious charges against Luft that they invoked to silence him.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have publicly demanded that Luft’s account of the Biden administration’s suppression of its efforts to hide Biden family crimes be publicly revealed. As an immediate first step, the Trump team should demand the lame-duck administration’s withdrawal of the still-operative request for Luft’s extradition and arrest in Cyprus. Luft could then return home and publicly tell his story.