Patrick Ho hardly seemed the profile of a big-time international fixer. A short, pudgy man, affectionately known to friends as “Fat Ping,” Ho had been a Harvard-trained ophthalmologist and a Hong Kong government minister. Yet in the fall of 2017, after landing at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City, he was arrested by FBI agents and charged in an audacious plot to dole out millions of dollars in bribes to African leaders in exchange for major energy contracts that appeared to advance Chinese government interests.
What emerged in his indictment and later trial and conviction in federal court was a revealing portrait of Chinese influence peddling that included allegations that Ho arranged to broker arms deals — including the sale of rocket and grenade launchers — to countries in war zones in Africa and the Middle East.
There was one noteworthy detail, however, about Ho’s global wheeling and dealing that went unmentioned in federal court documents or Justice Department press releases at the time. During the same period that he was being pursued by the FBI for his role in the global bribery scheme, Ho and his boss, Ye Jianming, a billionaire oil tycoon with past ties to a front for the People’s Liberation Army, had entered into a business relationship with two members of the Biden family — President Biden’s son Hunter Biden and the president’s brother, James Biden.
As Yahoo News first reported, when Ho was arrested by agents at JFK, the first call he made was to James Biden. (The president’s brother later told the New York Times that he believed the call was intended for his nephew Hunter.) At the time, Ho’s connection to the Bidens was unclear. But emails on a damaged laptop that Hunter Biden left at a computer repair store in Wilmington, Del. — many of which have since been authenticated by the Washington Post and the Times — as well as bank records and other documents uncovered by Senate Republican investigators, reveal a high-dollar money trail that flowed from Chinese interests to Hunter and James Biden and which now appears to be at the heart of an ongoing Justice Department criminal investigation. (George Mesires, a lawyer for both Hunter and James Biden, did not respond to requests for comment from Yahoo News. A lawyer for Ho declined to comment.)
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But there are indications that Hunter Biden had good reason to suspect the Chinese intelligence connections of Ho and Ye. In a May 11, 2018, audio recording of a conversation with an unidentified woman found on the laptop, a copy of which has been obtained by Yahoo News, Hunter Biden complained about getting a phone call from a New York Times reporter asking about his representation of Ho. He is “literally the f***ing spy chief of China,” Biden says to the woman, clearly overstating Ho’s role. (It is unclear why the conversation, which was recorded by the woman, was on the laptop.)
https://news.yahoo.com/new-hunter-bi...90046438.html?
- berryberry
- 04-11-2022, 10:39 AM