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 of cementing testimony linking the president to foreign deals.
“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 members from both sides of the political aisle in the closed-door session.
“The Biden family business was Joe Biden, period,” Bobulinski 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.
Tony Bobulinski is a former Navy officer who worked with first son Hunter Biden and first brother James on a venture with CEFC China Energy. AFP via Getty Images
Bobulinski alleged in his testimony in the House impeachment probe that President Biden was “the brand” being sold by his family. Shutterstock“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.
Since 2020, Bobulinski has been the most outspoken former Biden family associate — publicly calling Joe Biden a liar for dismissing documents from Hunter’s abandoned laptop as Russian disinformation ahead of Biden’s final debate against then-President Donald Trump.
Bobulinski also repeatedly appeared on national TV to detail his interactions with the Biden family, including a pair of alleged May 2017 conversations with Joe Biden.
“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. NY Post compositeIt is unclear if Bobulinski will provide any new information, but he is expected to serve as a corroborating witness to key facts outlined by other family associates — such as Devon Archer’s testimony about the Biden family selling their “brand” and Rob Walker’s dating of the Biden family relationship with CEFC to as early as 2015.
Joe Biden’s role in CEFC has long been a source of intrigue.
A May 2017 e-mail penciled in the future president, referred to as the “big guy,” for a 10% portion of a planned joint venture with CEFC — though it is unclear if he ever actually received that cut.
Joe Biden attended a meeting at DC’s Four Seasons hotel in early 2017 with CEFC chairman Ye Jianming, who has since gone missing in China amid corruption allegations, Walker told Congress in a Jan. 26 deposition.
“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. AFP via Getty ImagesWalker said the CEFC relationship began during Joe Biden’s vice presidency and that he disbursed an initial tranche of more than $1 million from the Chinese company to the Bidens beginning in March 2017 — weeks after Joe Biden left office as vice president that January — as a “thank you” for prior work.
Bobulinski is expected to face grilling from congressional Democrats after infuriating them by sandbagging Biden moments before his final debate against Trump.
Biden’s defenders on the House panels are expected to attempt to flip the script by depicting Bobulinski as an embittered and jilted former partner due to his allegations that Hunter cheated him in the venture.
But Bobulinski described himself as a patriotic truth-teller.
“I am a proud American citizen who has honorably served the United States in several capacities. For over six years, I was an officer in the United States Navy’s elite Naval Nuclear Power Training Command as a decorated Master Training Specialist Instructor. I later served as the Command’s Chief Technology Officer, where I held a security clearance from the Department of Energy and from the NatIonal Security Agency,” he said in his opening statement Tuesday.
“I am here today out of duty to God and country in a nonpartIsan manner with only one party in mind, the party I served with honor and gratitude: the United States of America. While I have made a few campaign contributIons over the years to Democrats such as Congressman Ro Khanna, a member of the Oversight Committee, I am not a political person.”
Bobulinski worked with Hunter and James Biden on a venture with CEFC China Energy. AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
Bobulinksi claimed that Biden “enabled” the CEFC deal. APThe congressional inquiry into the Bidens last year turned up evidence that 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 that 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.
