One of House Republicans’ most prominent investigators Wednesday and attempted to link the story to the president’s son Hunter Biden, saying “there most certainly is a connection” between the documents and the younger Biden’s business dealings in China.
Bartiromo said Chung was “overseeing the packing of this,” referring to the president’s documents. “Do we know if she’s reporting back to the CCP about any of this?” she asked.
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“We’re looking into that. We’re looking into at least three different people that Hunter Biden was directly involved with that have very close ties to the Chinese Communist Party,” Comer said.
The back-and-forth between Comer and Bartiromo has been going on for days. On Jan. 22, Bartiromo introduced an interview with Comer by saying “we do not know if [Chung] was ultimately reporting back to the Chinese Communist Party.” Bartiromo asked Comer about “the links between Joe Biden and Communist China” and whether it had dictated the way Biden treats the country.
“Most Americans would be shocked if they saw how many connections the Biden family has to people directly affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party,” Comer said.
“It’s particularly odious in a partisan atmosphere like this, where people feel no compunction about suggesting that someone is a traitor without any evidence, and frankly knowing that it’s not true.”
– Bill Taylor, attorney for Kathy Chung
Conspiracy theories about the former Biden aide have been brewing for months on the right-wing web, stemming from various email exchanges with Chung reportedly taken from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
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In one exchange, Chung emailed with Hunter Biden about taking a job in his father’s vice presidential office. She’d previously worked for former Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), a longtime staffer and friend of Joe Biden who ultimately recommended her for the job, the Post first reported. Taylor confirmed these details to HuffPost, noting Chung and Biden’s son met when they both worked at the Department of Commerce.
“Call if/ when you want me to tell Dad you are interested,” Hunter Biden reportedly told Chung of the job in a 2012 email, asking in another, “Would you like me to see when you can meet with VP?”
In a 2015 email, Chung sent invitations to a State Department luncheon co-hosted by Biden and then-Secretary of State John Kerry honoring Chinese President Xi Jinping. In February 2017, a month after Joe Biden left the White House, Hunter Biden invited Chung to work with him; she reportedly responded that she was looking to “stay on” with Joe Biden. Chung never worked for Hunter Biden, Taylor said.
Referring to these emails, Newsmax’s Pellegrino exclaimed in her interview with Comer, “Hunter’s laptop just keeps on giving us a lot!”
None of the emails between Chung and Hunter Biden offer any sign that Chung is or was a secret Chinese agent rather than a regular mid-level political aide. And yet that’s the narrative currently being blessed by the top Republican on the Oversight Committee. Comer is a noted master of tying everything back to Hunter Biden.
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“Hunter Biden was in charge of picking the people out to pack the boxes and transport the boxes from point A to point B,” he told Bartiromo on Wednesday. (“That’s not true,” Taylor told HuffPost.)
On Thursday, Comer recited the same line to Sean Hannity: “We’re learning in our investigation that Hunter played a role in determining who actually would be in charge of taking the documents from the vice president’s office to the first point of delivery for those documents.”
Separately in that interview, Hannity referenced a reported 2015 email from Chung to Hunter Biden, sent the day after the funeral of Hunter’s brother Beau. In it, Chung includes a list of phone numbers for high-profile people, including former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and several senators and members of Congress.
Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
This email in particular has been chum for the right-wing web. Trump pardon recipient Michael Flynn gushed a few days before the 2020 presidential election, “Any foreign power would love to have this information!!!”
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And G News, a China-focused, Steve Bannon-linked website, published an article the same day headlined, without evidence, “Hunter Biden Sold the Clintons’ Phone Numbers to the CCP.” The article references the Bannon-connected Chinese internet personality Lu De, whose real name is Wang Dinggang. The New York Times and NBC News have reported Wang is the origin of several Hunter Biden rumors.
The G News post claimed “the purpose of sending Hunter this email is so that he could forward the phone list to the CCP.” (“Crazy and absurd,” Taylor said.)
In his interview with Hannity, Comer dove down the rabbit hole.
Hunter Biden, he said, would “try to prove his worth to these people in these other countries that were paying these enormous sums of money to him,” in part by “showing them he had cell numbers for powerful individuals.”
As Fox News’ exit music swelled, Comer rushed to finish his point: “Influence peddling! That’s what we’re investigating, and more and more evidence turns up every day to prove that this family has been involved in it, and that Joe Biden was an integral part of it.”
