U.S. officials were acutely aware that Beijing was trying to obtain America’s premiere nuclear reactor technology, including through illicit hacking, months before Hunter Biden and his business partners sought to arrange a quiet sale of an iconic U.S. reactor company to a Chinese firm, according to court records and national security experts.
Hunter Biden’s unsuccessful efforts to help CEFC China Energy acquire Westinghouse, one of America’s most famous electricity and appliance brands, and its state-the-art AP1000 nuclear reactor began in early 2016 while Joe Biden was still a sitting vice president, memos published Wednesday by Just the News show.
Just 20 months earlier, his father’s Justice Department charged five members of a Chinese military hacking unit for breaching the company’s computer systems in search of intellectual property and internal strategy communications, according to a copy of the indictment.
In May 2014, the five operatives of the People’s Liberation Army’s Unit 61398 were charged with hacking into the systems of six U.S.-based companies across different industrial sectors, including Westinghouse Electric Co., SolarWorld, United States Steel Corp., and a union. The attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, called the breach a classic case of “economic espionage.”
One operative gained access to Westinghouse’s computers in 2010 and “stole proprietary and confidential technical and design specifications related to pipes, pipe supports, and pipe routing” pertaining to the company’s advanced AP1000 nuclear reactor design, according to an indictment filed by the Department of Justice.
“Among other things, such specifications would enable a competitor to build a plant similar to the AP1000 without incurring significant research and development costs associated with designing similar pipes, pipe supports, and pipe routing systems,” the indictment reads.
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Criminal No. 14-118 USA vs. Wang Dong et al.pdf
National security experts said Thursday they were floored that the son of a sitting vice president would be involved in trying to help a Chinese firm get a leg up on the United States in the race for nuclear energy and that Hunter Biden’s involvement with CEFC almost certainly would have been detected by U.S. intelligence and prompted concern.
Documents previously released by Congress in the Biden impeachment inquiry show the Biden family appeared to be acutely aware that CEFC was tied directly to the communist government in China.
While there is no evidence at the moment that Hunter Biden was aware of or involved in the hacking efforts by the Chinese, Hunter Biden wrote in one text message in 2017 that he believed one of the CEFC officials he worked with, Patrick Ho, was the “f—ing spy chief” of China (Ho was lated indicted in the U.S. and charged with corruption) while Joe Biden’s brother James told the FBI he believed CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming had a relationship with China’s communist president.
“It’s beyond outrageous that Hunter Biden would be involved in any such deal with Communist China while his father is the sitting vice president,” former Trump-era Deputy National Security Advisor Victoria Coates told the “Just the News, No Noise” television show. “I mean just the glaring conflicts of interest are hard to wrap your brain around. But particularly with Westinghouse.”
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