(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Years after conservative outlets exposed Hunter Biden’s shady foreign business dealings, the New York Times has now acknowledged yet another case of potential corruption and conflict of interest — this time tied to Romania and the Chinese.
According to the Times, Biden was part of a venture that sought sell land around the U.S. Embassy building in Romania to a group that included a Chinese company.
“The deal he was pursuing left open the possibility that the Chinese could have ended up with an ownership stake in a critical asset—the land around the embassy in Bucharest, and possibly the land on which the embassy sat,” the Times reported on Tuesday.
“The possibility concerned one of his former partners who sought to avoid the outcome at the time, while another partner later rejected the idea that it was ever on the table.”
The Times reported that the land deal collapsed in 2017, before the Chinese invested any money in it, due to a feud between Biden’s partners.
Still, Hunter’s work in Romania was one of the cases that left him vulnerable to possible foreign agent charges. In 2015, Hunter was recruited by Romanian real estate magnate Gabriel Popoviciu, who had been under investigation since the early 2000s, in an effort to sway U.S. officials on his behalf.
Just one year earlier, in 2014, then-Vice President Joe Biden had traveled to Bucharest to slam corruption as “a cancer.” Yet, his son would end up working with one of Romania’s most controversial real estate developers.
Popoviciu enlisted both Hunter and his uncle James Biden, who sought to bring in funding from CEFC China Energy, a company tied to the communist government’s Belt and Road initiative.
According to the Times, Hunter leveraged his family name to attract CEFC’s investment. Between 2015 and 2017, Popoviciu paid Hunter $1 million, while another $2 million were put aside for Hunter’s associates.
Special Counsel David Weiss flagged the deal as a possible violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, alleging that Hunter had cunningly arranged the payments to avoid “political ramifications” for his father.
Weiss used the Romania case in 2023 as leverage in negotiating an already lenient plea deal that would have spared Hunter from FARA charges. That deal collapsed amid scrutiny from the judge who presided over the case.
Hunter “performed almost no work in exchange for the millions of dollars he received from these entities,” Weiss said.
Hunter’s efforts in Romania proved unsuccessful. In 2016, Popoviciu was sentenced to seven years in prison. His sentence was vacated by a Romanian court in 2024. That same year, Biden became the first president in U.S. history to issue sweeping pardons to his family.
The Times story is written by Kenneth P. Vogel as he promotes his upcoming book titled Devils’ Advocates; The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington Insiders on the Payrolls of Corrupt Foreign Interests. The timing is notable because the outlet largely ignored the scandal for years.
