Hunter Biden’s hard drive contained an enviable lineup of contacts for top US officials tasked with overseeing the US-China relationship, and at least 10 senior Google executives — raising new questions about the extent to which Joe Biden’s well-connected son could have leveraged his connections for personal profit, The Post has learned.
Many of the top-level government officials would have been in position to help Hunter Biden’s business aspirations in China during father’s term as vice president from 2008 to 2016. Throughout that period, he infamously looked to capitalize from his family name and connections — often while his father conducted sensitive state business.
As for the Google braintrust, one former exec there told The Post that Hunter Biden sought the tech giant’s cash for Chinese ventures, and that several of the company’s bigwigs wound up working for the Obama-Biden administration during his father’s vice presidency.
Among the names and personal cell phone numbers of the dozens of government officials and federal employees found in the infamous laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019: John Kerry and Max Baucus, who served as Secretary of State and U.S. Ambassador to China, respectively, during the Biden vice presidency. The Post reached Kerry’s answering machine when it called the number listed in the laptop. Baucus had a Chinese phone number listed and The Post was unable to reach him.
Hunter Biden and his father had been active in China for a long time.
In 2013, Hunter Biden tagged along on Air Force 2 when his father went to Beijing to visit with Xi Jinping. The vice president was looking to de-escalate tensions in the South China Sea, but his son was looking to deal, paying a visit to Jonathan Li, a Chinese financier who ran the private-equity fund Bohai Capital. He even finagled a handshake between Li and the elder Biden.
Ten days later the Chinese business license for Bohai Harvest — a new company which would invest Chinese cash in projects outside the country that Hunter Biden had been trying to launch for more than a year — was approved by Chinese officials.
Hunter would be wined, dined and feted by Chinese oligarchs throughout his father’s term in office. Ye Jianming, boss of CEFC China Energy Co., even presented him with an $80,000 diamond as a gift. The rock later became an albatross during his divorce proceedings with wife Kathleen Buhle.
In addition to meeting with Hunter’s business partners at the White House, Joe Biden was identified as a recipient of a 10% equity stake in a company created for a joint venture with CEFC. He was referred to in emails as “the big guy,” according to former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski.
Baucus and Kerry — both former US senators — may have been chummy with Hunter Biden from his father’s Senate days, but other US-China officials whose names were in the laptop don’t present any obvious prior connection to the former second son.
Bruce Quinn — who is listed in the hard drive as a “Director for Implementation” at the US Trade Representative office of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan — said he had no idea why he would be among the names in the hard drive.
“I have never met him. I can’t even imagine,” Quinn told The Post. “Back then I used to go to all kinds of conferences and seminars. There is no doubt he could have attended one of the events with me.”
All of the others named as US-China contacts in Hunter’s address book either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment from The Post. They include:
- Thomas Parker, a special advisor to the vice president for national security affairs
- Sarah E. Kemp, who served as a commercial counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing
- Patrick Mulloy, former commissioner of the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission
“Once again, this raises questions about the extent to which Hunter Biden used his father’s name for personal gain. Why does Hunter have these contacts? Did he ever meet or contact these individuals in their official capacity? And if so, how did those contacts benefit Hunter, his father, and Biden Inc.?” Sen Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) told The Post.
President Biden has consistently denied any involvement in his son’s foreign business dealings, despite a growing body of evidence which now suggests the elder Biden was intimately involved.
As for Google, Kenneth Davies, who worked with the $1.7 trillion company’s philanthropic and venture capital arms between 2008 and 2012, said he remembered Hunter Biden coming to the company headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to pitch Googlers on investments abroad. Davies was one of the 10 Google executives found in the laptop.
“He was pitching some crazy things like some Chinese stuff. … We kind of looked at it and I kinda scoffed at it,” Davies, 42, told The Post. “He certainly did not know what he was talking about as it relates to energy. It was very much ‘I am Hunter Biden — look at the last name. Rosemont Seneca. We are brokering deals.’ He certainly did not have subject matter expertise about what he was trying to pitch.”
Rosemont Seneca was an investment firm founded in June 2009 by Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz, the ketchup fortune heir and stepson of John Kerry. Eric Schwerin was later named its president. The fund aggressively pursued deals in Russia, Romania, Ukraine, China and elsewhere.
Davies said could not recall the specific ventures Hunter Biden presented at the Spring 2011 meeting. Davies sent a LinkedIn connection request to Hunter Biden in June of that year, the laptop shows.
“My overall impression [was] this guy has clearly just been riding daddy’s coat tails and I have better things to do with my time,” Davies said.
Bill Maris, who founded Google Ventures — the company’s venture capital arm — was also in the laptop, along with Dan Reicher, a one-time director of the company’s Climate Change and Energy Initiatives. Both men have since left the company.
A calendar invite on the hard drive shows a video conference between Maris and Rosemont Seneca Partners scheduled for September 29, 2009.
Other named Google employees included:
- Alan Davidson, former director of public policy, Americas
- Christiaan Adams, senior developer advocate, Google Earth Outreach & Crisis Response
- Johanna Shelton, director, Public Policy
- Manuel Tamez, former head of Public Policy and Government Affairs, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean
- Mike Brazil, Finance Operations manager
- Jacquelline Fuller, vice president, Google; president, Google.org
- Megan Smith, former vice president, New Business Development
In emails, Hunter and his cronies made a point of targeting Reicher on behalf of SmartSynch, a Jackson, Miss.-based Smart Grid technology and energy monitoring and management firm. The business involved the development of smart meters which made use of existing public wireless networks to communicate with utilities. The company went under in 2021`.
Emails show Hunter Biden and Reicher being connected by Fuller, who now spearheads the philanthropy arm at Google.org. Another calendar invite lists a call between Hunter Biden and Reicher scheduled for April 2, 2010.
“We were making actual real live investments in companies and making some grants to NGOs and others. We were funding research,” Reicher said of his work at Google, though he could not recall ever meeting Hunter Biden.
In a statement Google said they had never invested cash in any Hunter Biden projects.
“These are mostly long-departed employees and we have no record of any such investments,” a Google spokesperson told The Post.
Several Google employees in Hunter’s phone went on to senior White House roles while his father served as vice president. Davidson landed a gig as director of Digital Economy for the US Commerce Department in June 2015. Smith became the country’s third chief technology officer in September 2014.
Hunter Biden and Smith were chummy during her tenure at Google and while she served as CTO. After she was appointed, Hunter toasted her at a party at the home of DC powerbroker Hilary Rosen. Smith’s then-wife, New York Times columnist Kara Swisher, was there, as was Dr. Anthony Fauci, according to press reports.
A calendar alert shows an appointment between Smith and Eric Schwerin, the president of Hunter Biden’s investment firm Rosemont Seneca, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Feb 20, 2015 at 4 p.m.
Davies also recalled the company hosting big fundraisers on behalf of the Democratic National Committee — and indeed, like many in Silicon Valley, Google and their employees served as reliable cash cows for Biden and the Democratic party.
While at Google, Smith donated more than $75,000 to the Democratic Party, Federal Election Commission records show. Fuller has given more than $27,000 to Democrats since 2009 — including max $2,700 donations to Biden’s presidential campaign committee and his political action committee, records show.
Aside from Davies and Reicher, all the current and former Google employees declined or did not respond to request for comment from The Post.