Today’s Biden Inc question: Did an FBI ‘mole’ tip Hunter to indictments of China-intel front execs?

How did an executive of CEFC, a known front for China’s intelligence apparatus, manage to get out of the US ahead of sealed indictments from the Department of Justice? According to the “missing witness” in the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into Biden Inc, Hunter Biden himself alerted the CEFC of the secret legal danger looming for for Patrick Ho.

Gal Luft, who faces a federal indictment himself at the moment, has told the committee that a “mole” in the FBI tipped Hunter to the indictment. Miranda Devine lays out the latest development:

In an open letter to Reps James Comer (R-Ky.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the three House committee chairmen running the impeachment inquiry, Luft claims that the tipoff to Chinese executives of CEFC came on the same day that the first son wrote a WhatsApp message shaking down another CEFC employee for millions of dollars over a “highly confidential and time sensitive” matter while claiming his father was in the room with him.

“I am sitting here with my father, and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” Hunter wrote to CEFC employee Raymond Zhao on July 30, 2017, in a WhatsApp message that was presented to Congress in June during testimony by IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley. …

Later that night, CEFC executive Patrick Ho, who was staying in a hotel in Manhattan, received an urgent call from CEFC president Chan Chauto in Shanghai, who told him to leave the US immediately, according to Luft, who speaks to Ho regularly.

The next day, Ho flew to Hong Kong, where he remained for four months.

Does that seem a little too coincidental, especially in the context of Biden Inc? It certainly did to Zhao, who apparently rushed to make up with Hunter after Ho’s narrow escape. He didn’t even wait a day to signal that CEFC would comply with Hunter’s money demands:

Zhao told Hunter in a follow-up WhatsApp on July 31, 2017, that “CEFC is willing to cooperate with the family. He thinks now the priority is to solve the problem mentioned last night.”

Luft believes the “problem” and “highly confidential and time sensitive” matter that Zhao and Hunter discussed was the secret SDNY indictments.

Is that the only interpretation for Zhao’s quick turnaround? No, but it may make the most sense. By July 2017, Joe Biden was out of public office and generally was considered to be heading for retirement rather than another campaign. Biden’s defenders have made that point more than once in rebutting other interpretations of this WhatsApp message. What good is a threat to involve The Big Guy when The Big Guy had no authority, and no ability to deliver on any promises — especially in the Donald Trump administration, which despised the Bidens?

Luft’s sequence explains that more clearly, assuming it can be corroborated. CEFC must have balked at the payment for the reasons I just laid out — that Joe Biden was a spent force and no longer had much value. Hunter had to demonstrate that the Bidens pere et fils could still deliver — and did so by obstructing justice in the DoJ effort to prosecute Ho. If so, it worked; as Devine relates, the Biden Inc LLC archipelago received $1.5 million from CEFC nine days later.

Luft claims he got the story directly from Ho:

Luft, who also had been earning money through a partnership with CEFC, flew to Hong Kong to see Ho on Aug. 14, 2017, two weeks after his sudden departure. Ho told him about the SDNY indictments, and that Hunter had a mole inside the FBI who had tipped him off. The Chinese nickname for the mole was “One-Eye.”

“The existence of a potential mole within the FBI and/or Justice Department who conveyed to Chinese individuals information about sealed indictments has, apparently, to this day never been solved,” Luft wrote in his letter to Comer. “Perhaps Congress should investigate the issue as part of its impeachment inquiry.”

A mole might explain another part of the mystery more directly relating to Gal, too. Gal first made the claim about a mole called “One Eye” six months ago when he was arrested under another DoJ indictment for arms trafficking, charges Luft vehemently denies. If Luft is telling the truth about “One Eye,” then the Luft indictment might be a corrupt attempt to either silence or discredit him as a witness to the Bidens’ corruption.

However, by the same token, it’s also possible that “One Eye” is a Luft concoction to discredit the DoJ’s arms-trafficking investigation. And it’s still entirely possible  that both stories are true, and that both stories are false.

But Devine has a bit more, this time involving a known corrupt FBI figure:

The tipoff to CEFC executives came at a crucial stage in their negotiations to buy into Russian state-owned energy company Rosneft and came just 10 days before a curious meeting between a CEFC employee in Albania and disgraced G-man Charles McGonigal, then counterintelligence boss at the FBI’s New York Field Office, which had been surveilling Ho and his associates. McGonigal pleaded guilty Friday to concealing at least $225,000 in cash payments from a former Albanian intelligence official.

On September 9, 2017, McGonigal met with CEFC official and Hunter associate Dorien Ducka along with Albanian PM Edi Rama, Devine writes, to warn the PM about selling oil licenses to “Russian front companies.” That took place a day after CEFC announced plans to acquire a $9 billion share in Rosneft, and a day before CEFC signed a new $1 million retainer agreement with Hunter Biden. To call the timing around these meetings “curious” is to offer a masterclass in understatement. It certainly presents indirect and circumstantial evidence of corruption, and raises the question as to whether “One Eye” was actually McGonigal. He would have been perfectly positioned to know about the case on Ho, and apparently connected enough to Biden Inc to pass it along for his and their benefit.

Comer offered an ambiguous if generally positive response to this response from Luft, calling it “helpful” but noting the need to “verify the accuracy” of Luft’s claims. That’s a smart approach. There is certainly some circumstantial smoke here, but not enough evidence of fire to yank the alarm.