With energy prices putting the squeeze on household budgets throughout the country, the Biden Administration announced plans in April to tap the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices.
At the time, a Department of Energy news release said this action would “address the pain Americans are feeling at the pump as a result of Putin’s Price Hike and to help lower energy costs. That includes President [Joe] Biden authorizing the release of 1 million barrels per day from the SPR for the next six months.”
As the amount of oil in the SPR has fallen to its lowest level since 1986, a Department of Energy spokesperson told Reuters, “The SPR remains a critical energy security tool to address global crude oil supply disruptions.”
Lest you think the administration had only American consumers in mind, Reuters reported on Wednesday that over 5 million barrels of oil were exported to Europe and Asia in June.
The story gets worse.
On Thursday, the Washington Free Beacon reported that 950,000 barrels were sold to a CCP-owned gas company called Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation. This company is also known as Sinopec.
There are several issues with this deal. First, in April, “six people” told Reuters that Sinopec agreed not to initiate any new contracts to purchase Russian oil, as per western sanctions. The report said Sinopec would be honoring existing contracts, “but avoiding new ones despite steep discounts.”
Predictably, it appears that the company has continued to buy oil from Russia.
In late May Bloomberg reported Sinopec had hired “at least 10 tankers so far this month to transport Russian ESPO crude that’s loaded from Kozmino port, according to traders and a shipbroker. That would be a fivefold increase on the number of vessels booked for the trade a month earlier, data from shipping analytics firm Vortexa show.”
Do you think the media will start covering the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes once the midterms are over?
Then, we get down to the heart of the matter.
The Free Beacon spoke to Daniel Turner, the founder of Power the Future, a nonprofit that focuses on the energy industry. Turner said his organization had rebuked the Biden administration for selling “raw materials to the Communist Chinese for them to use as they want.”
“We were assured Biden was releasing this oil to America so it could be refined for gasoline to drive down prices at the pump. So right off the bat, they’re just lying to the American people,” he said. “What they’re saying they did and what they did are not remotely related.”
Most significantly, Turner pointed to the Biden family’s “relationship with China.”
According to the Free Beacon, “Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is tied to Sinopec. In 2015, a private equity firm he cofounded bought a $1.7 billion stake in Sinopec Marketing. Sinopec went on to enter negotiations to purchase Gazprom in March, one month after the Biden administration sanctioned the Russian gas giant.”
In 2015, Biden was still the Vice President. And nobody’s buying his claims that he never discussed Hunter’s overseas business dealings with him. In addition to numerous photographs of Biden with Hunter’s associates, a 2018 voicemail surfaced last week that blows a Grand Canyon-sized hole in that narrative.
Biden refers to an article in The New York Times about the chairman of Chinese energy company CEFC, Ye Jianming, with whom Hunter had met the previous year at a Miami hotel. Biden tells his son he thinks he’s “clear.”
“Hey pal, it’s Dad. It’s 8:15 on Wednesday night. If you have a chance give me a call. Nothing urgent — I just wanted to talk with you. I thought the article released online, it’s going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good. I think you’re clear.”
NEW: In 2018, Joe Biden left a voicemail for Hunter saying he wanted to talk to him about a New York Times report on Hunter’s business deals in China.
Biden repeatedly said he “never discussed” business with Hunter. pic.twitter.com/7r9VatHUoH
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 27, 2022
Putting aside this administration’s inexplicable decision to sell oil to China, how is it possible the media continues to ignore the growing evidence of the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes?
Most glaring of all are the 150 suspicious activity reports generated for transactions made by either Hunter Biden or his uncle, Jim Biden.
The existence of these SARS was reported in early April by CBS News. Since that time, the legacy media has failed to follow up.
In a Thursday appearance on “Fox & Friends First,” Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky explained that after 9/11, the government created SARs “to try to catch money laundering into terrorist cells” in the U.S. Up until recently, he said, a member of Congress could simply ask the Treasury Department for reports on any transactions occurring in their congressional district or state. Now, Treasury is blocking those requests.
Comer said, “A suspicious activity report is a very serious banking violation. … When Joe Biden became president and this is before it became public knowledge that Hunter had these suspicious activity reports, he, in the dark of night, changed it to where Congress could no longer access that from Treasury. Now, we have formally requested the suspicious activity report on Hunter Biden and the White House will not allow us to have it unless the Democrats sign on to the request.
Weird, huh?
Fox News’ Jesse Watters covered the story on the Wednesday and Thursday night episodes of his show.
How unusual are SARs?
Comer comes from a banking family. He told Watters on Wednesday: “It’s very uncommon for anyone in America to get more than one suspicious activity report. 99.9 percent of Americans never get a suspicious activity report. But to get 150! I’m gonna go out on a limb, Jesse, and say that’s more than anyone in the history of the United States.”
It’s time for some transparency.
