Tom Fitton: JW Files Lawsuits on Biden
Ukraine-China Scandal; JW Battles in Court to Question Clinton; Trump Boots
China From U.S. Port
Judicial Watch Files Two More Lawsuits on Biden Ukraine-China
Scandal
Our government doesn’t assume that every business investment opportunity
is good for our country, and so there are checks in place, including
something called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States
(CFIUS). CFIUS is
commissioned to review “transactions involving foreign investment in the
U.S. to determine the effect of such transactions on the national security
of the United States.”
What does CFIUS know about Hunter Biden’s questionable overseas ventures?
The agency is playing its cards close to the vest. So we are suing the
State and Treasury Departments for information on CFIUS’ handling of
investments in the U.S. by two companies tied to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter
Biden. The companies are Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings and China’s Bohai
Harvest RST (BHR).
We sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the
departments failed to respond to June 24, 2019, FOIA requests for CFIUS
records related to investments by the Ukrainian company Burisma Holdings
LTD or any of its affiliated entities and records related to investments by
the Chinese company Bohai Harvest RST or any of its affiliated entities (Judicial
Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:19-cv-02960)), (Judicial
Watch v. U.S. Department of the Treasury (No.
1:19-cv-02961).
Hunter Biden, son of former Vice President Joe Biden, is reported to be one
of nine directors of BHR Partners, which was registered 12
days after the vice president’s son, in December 2013, flew to
Beijing aboard Air Force Two, while his father made an official visit as
vice president. Hunter Biden, then-chairman of the private equity firm
Rosemont Seneca, reportedly signed
a deal with the Chinese government-owned Bank of China to set up the BHR $1
billion joint venture investment fund.
In 2015, BHR Partners participated in a $600
million buyout of Michigan
automotive-suspension-systems maker Henniges Automotive. Henniges
produces anti-vibration technologies which have important military uses,
particularly in military aircraft.
In April 2014, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, one of
the Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies. Hunter was reportedly paid
$50,000 a month to, in the words of a Burmisa
news release, “provide support for the Company among international
organizations." Biden has denied that was his role.
In 2015, Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, launched an
investigation into allegedly corrupt practices by Burisma. Shokin was
ousted in 2016. And in a widely distributed 2018 video,
Joe Biden confirmed that he had successfully pressured the Ukrainian
government, under threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. government aid,
to fire Shokin. (In September, we sued the
State Department for records about the firing of Ukraine’s top
prosecutor after then-Vice President Joe Biden threatened to withhold
aid.)
The Commerce Department recently barred over two dozen Chinese companies
from doing business in the U.S., one of which is reported to be Megvii
Technology, an artificial intelligence company focused on
developing facial
recognition technology. BHR Partners owns a stake in Megvii.
Have no doubt: We will continue to press for information to get to the
bottom of this influence-peddling scandal involving Joe Biden and his son.
As Congress is obsessed with attacking President Trump, it is again up to
us to do the basic investigative work on this growing scandal.
Judicial Watch Battles in Court to Question Hillary Clinton Under
Oath
Here’s an update on the Clinton email deposition.
A federal court will soon rule on whether Hillary Clinton and her top aide
can be questioned under oath by our lawyers about her email and Benghazi
controversies. The court has already granted us additional discovery and is
now considering Clinton’s objections, filed on September
23, to being questioned. We filed our response to Clinton on October
3 (Judicial
Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)).
The court previously ordered discovery into three specific areas: whether
Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server was intended to stymie
FOIA; whether the State Department’s intent to settle this case in late
2014 and early 2015 amounted to bad faith; and whether the State Department
has adequately searched for records responsive to our request. The court
specifically ordered Obama
administration senior State Department officials, lawyers and Clinton aides
to be deposed or answer written questions under oath. The
court ruled that
the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to
government transparency.”
On August 22, 2019, the court then ruled that
Clinton and Mills had 30 days to oppose being questioned in person under
oath by us related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of
a private email server. Additionally, we were granted seven new
depositions, three interrogatories and four document requests. In
granting the additional discovery, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C.
Lamberth commented: “I’ll tell you everything they’ve discovered in
this period raises serious questions about what the hell the State
Department’s doing here.”
Clinton’s lawyers, in opposing the request to question her, argued that
she’s already answered all important questions about her emails and
Benghazi. We reject this, noting her answers about her email use raise
additional, important questions:
Judicial Watch should be permitted to
directly question Secretary Clinton about her motives, thoughts, and
efforts regarding the “convenience” she relies upon in justifying her
use of a secret, private server and email address in direct violation of
federal records laws and State Department policies.
Clinton also suggests that her emails would have been captured by State
Department records systems, which is contradicted by Tasha
Thian, a retired senior State records official, we recently
questioned:
According to Ms. Thian’s testimony, there
are at least six occasions Secretary Clinton was or should have been fully
informed of federal records management, including email records, and
compliance responsibilities. Yet Secretary Clinton’s actual understanding
of her obligations with respect to official State Department records is
completely absent from the record.
Thian implied that it was inconceivable that Clinton was not aware of her
obligations regarding federal records and email management:
I don’t understand why she would come up
with this statements that she was allowed – or how she would save
record email by emailing another employee’s account. She had resources
there aplenty. So it just doesn’t make sense to me.
[Even before taking office, Secretary
Clinton] knew we had a process.
Additionally, Clinton’s former Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, testifying on
whether Clinton understood that FOIA applied to the clintonemail.com
system, stated that we “would have to ask Mrs. Clinton.”
Hillary Clinton is now joking about her emails even as she seeks to avoid
being questioned on this serious scandal. The court has found that this
email use and cover-up are no joking matter.
Last month, the State Department, under court order, finally provided us
a previously hidden email,
which shows top State Department officials used and were aware of Hillary
Clinton’s email account.
Our discovery over the last several months found many more details about
the scope of the Clinton email scandal and cover-up:
- John Hackett, former Director of Information Programs and Services
(IPS) testified under
oath that he had raised concerns that former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton’s staff may have “culled out 30,000” of the secretary’s
“personal” emails without following strict National Archives standards.
He also revealed that he believed there was interference with the formal
FOIA review process related to the classification of Clinton’s
Benghazi-related emails.
- Heather Samuelson, Clinton’s White House liaison at the State
Department, and later Clinton’s personal lawyer, admitted under
oath that she was granted immunity by the Department of Justice in June
2016.
- Justin Cooper, former aide to President Bill Clinton and Clinton
Foundation employee who registered the domain name of the
unsecure clintonemail.com server that Clinton used while serving
as Secretary of State, testified
he worked with Huma Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, to create
the non-government email system.
- In the interrogatory
responses of E.W. (Bill) Priestap, assistant director of the FBI
Counterintelligence Division, he stated that the agency found Clinton email
records in the Obama White House, specifically, the Executive Office of the
President.
- Jacob “Jake” Sullivan, Clinton’s senior advisor and deputy chief
of staff when she was secretary of state, testified that
both he and Clinton used her unsecure non-government email system to
conduct official State Department business.
- Eric Boswell, former assistant secretary of state for diplomatic
security during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, testified that
Clinton was warned twice against using unsecure BlackBerry’s and personal
emails to transmit classified material.
Hillary Clinton said things in those missing emails that she doesn’t want
the world to know. Well, we’re curious.
Trump Boots Chinese Communists Out of U.S. Port
As the coup cabal assaults the rule of law in Washington, there has been
some important, positive news for our national security. Consider our
reclaiming of a major U.S. port from a Chinese Communist company. Our
Corruption Chronicles blog has the story.
Under a long-term deal sealed by the Obama administration, a Chinese
Communist company was set to control the second-busiest container port in
the United States. In an unreported Trump administration victory, the
Communists are out after a drawn-out national security review forced a unit
of China-based COSCO Shipping Holdings Co. (Orient Overseas Container
Line—OOCL) to sell the cherished container terminal business, which
handles among the largest freight of imports into the U.S.
It all started with a 40-year
container terminal lease between the Port of Long Beach in
southern California and Hong Kong. The Obama administration proudly signed
the agreement in 2012 giving China control of America’s second-largest
container port behind the nearby Port of Los Angeles. One of the Trump
administration’s first big moves was to get the Communists out of the
Port of Long Beach. After a national security review and federal
intervention, the Long Beach terminal business, which handles millions of
containers annually, is finally being sold to an Australian company called
Macquarie Infrastructure Partners. That essentially kills China’s
decades-long contract with the Obama administration.
The deal never should have been signed in the first place considering the
facility’s size, significance and the national security issues associated
with a hostile foreign government controlling it. The southern California
port is the premier U.S. gateway for trans-Pacific trade, according to
its website,
and handles trade valued at more than $194 billion annually. It is one of
the few ports that can accommodate the world’s largest vessels and serves
140 shipping lines with connections to 217 seaports around the world. The
facility encompasses 3,200 acres with 31 miles of waterfront, 10
piers, 62 berths and 68 post-Panamax gantry cranes. In 2018, the Long
Beach port handled more than 8 million container units, achieving the
busiest year in its history.
Removing Chinese Communists from this essential port is a tremendous feat
and a huge victory for U.S. national security. You’d never know it
because the media, consumed with the impeachment debacle, has ignored this
important achievement. The only coverage of the finalized transfer is found
in Long Beach’s local newspaper, which published a brief article omitting
important background information on the Trump administration’s work to
take back the terminal from the Communists. The story makes it seem like a
regular business transaction in which “a Chinese state-owned company,
reached a deal to sell the terminal, one of the busiest in the port, for
$1.78 billion.” The piece also quotes the Port of Long Beach’s
deputy executive director saying that the transaction process was intricate
and involved one of “our most valuable port assets.” Buried at the
bottom of the article is a sentence mentioning that the U.S. government,
which regulates mergers for antitrust and security reasons, stepped in and
required COSCO to sell its rights to the container terminal.
In the last few years China has bought cargo ports throughout the world,
including in Latin America, the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea.
Chinese-owned ports are located in Greece, Italy, Spain and other European
locations. In sub-Saharan Africa there are dozens of existing or planned
port projects funded or operated by China, according to a study that
highlights the threat the Chinese investments present to U.S. influence in
the region. One troubling analysis points
out that “COSCO’s commercial expansion has created leverage for Beijing
— leverage that has already resulted in countries that host COSCO ports
adopting China’s position on key international issues.”
Until next week,
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