[Note: Because of its length, I considered breaking this article into sequential parts posted separately. But it’s essential to take it in as a single, coherent story. Think of it as a single-themed chapter in an extensively researched book. The article stops a few times to marshal the facts and implication so far, a necessary technique, I believe, to keep it flowing as a single story. By the end of it, readers will see how Trump’s tenure affected a campaign launched in the Obama administration and pursued from its earliest days. In particular, Trump basically sent now-revealed Biden interests in that Obama campaign down the drain. Because of the length, and because the facts not included here are laid out elsewhere, I have left much that readers will be aware of on the cutting-room floor. This is not because I’m not aware of those facts. It’s because including everything would make this impossibly long, and is not essential to making the main point: Trump policy killed the Obama-Biden show. – J.E.]
On Saturday 18 November 2017, Chinese official Chi Ping “Patrick” Ho, then director of the China Energy Fund Committee (CEFC), was arrested by federal authorities of the U.S. Southern District of New York on bribery charges under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Ho and a Senegalese national, Cheikh Gadio, were charged with a bribery scheme entailing money-laundering (through the U.S. affiliate of an international bank) and involving officials of Chad and Uganda. (I’ve written about this story before; start here.)
The charges were unveiled the following week, with formal indictment following in December 2017. Ho was convicted on multiple counts under the FCPA in a jury trial in 2018, and sentenced in March of 2019 to three years in prison. (Curiously, Ho’s sentencing fell during the crowded late-March 2019 interlude when a host of other things related to the Bidens and Ukraine were occurring.)
The period of Ho’s and Gadio’s alleged offenses ran from 2014 to 2016.
Followers of the Patrick Ho saga are aware that Ho was the CCP-embedded Chinese official who in 2017 courted the Biden family with money and pricey shopping expeditions, in concert with the even more senior Ye Jianming, chairman of the CEFC. It was hoped that CEFC, a state investment company, would find common ground with Rosemont Seneca and its joint ventures with Chinese backers for an energy project, which Biden emails suggest involved natural gas. The 2017 timeline continued right up to Ho’s arrest and indictment by the Trump DOJ.
After Ho’s arrest in the U.S., Ye Jianming went missing in China in March 2018. This was during Ho’s prosecution in the Southern District of New York. In the span of less than six months, the Biden enterprises’ main contacts for their active 2017 project with China were taken off the playing field. Patrick Ho’s arrest and prosecution can be seen as the catalyst for this shift.
As we’ll see, the Trump administration processed these matters in a somewhat different way from the Obama administration. The differences seemed to be episodic, for the most part, although there was some general pattern as well. Intentionally or not, Trump’s federal departments ended up thwarting some American companies’ key business plans with China, an ongoing phenomenon noticed – not necessarily with appreciation – by the American principals (including Bill Gates), as well as the media.
We’ll discover that at least two of those episodes related directly to the Bidens’ interests. One was the interruption of Patrick Ho’s career. The other will become clear below.
But for a preview at the outset, consider an excited utterance from Hunter Biden in an audio recording from shortly after Ye Jianming went missing. (The recording was found on Hunter’s laptop, and according to the Daily Mail was incidental to a recorded interaction with a prostitute on 11 May 2018.)
In the recording, Hunter laments his unhappy state with Ho being prosecuted and Ye unreachable: “I have another New York Times reporter calling about my representation of Patrick Ho – the f****** spy chief of China who started the company that my partner [i.e., Ye], who is worth $323 billion, founded and is now missing. The richest man in the world is missing who was my partner.”
Hunter complains about being hounded by the New York Times and the SDNY U.S. Attorney. (Which incidentally is a clue to why Ye Jianming was spirited out of the United States. There was good reason for China and some U.S. interests to want to prevent Mr. Ye being hounded by the SDNY Attorney as a witness.)
But after the summary on Ho and Ye, the next words from Hunter are: “He [again, Ye Jianming] was missing since I last saw him in his $58 million apartment inside a $4 billion deal to build the f****** largest f***** LNG [liquified natural gas] port in the world.” (Emphasis added.)
Liquefied natural gas: that’s the deal Hunter referenced in relation to the loss of Ho and Ye, and the China connection they spearheaded.
Little of the investigative activity we’ve seen so far, whether from online sleuths or Congressional committees, has focused on the real business prospects being pursued by the Bidens and their associates in Ukraine and China. It’s been mostly about the potential bribery and influence angle involving the Biden family and its close business associates in the U.S.
But as Daniel Greenfield pointed out in his 28 July 2023 article at FrontPage, Biden, Inc. wasn’t just in it for the “overhead” perks.
Hunter Biden and Burisma were actually discussing the purchase by Burisma of a U.S. natural gas company. This proposed transaction was disclosed to the FBI by the confidential human source interviewed in June 2020, who was asked by Burisma to consider participating in it because, according to the CHS, “Hunter wasn’t smart.”
This deal was to enable Burisma to float an IPO in the United States and raise a tremendous amount of capital. As Greenfield observed, brokering that for Burisma was likely to pay off for the Biden investment instruments – including those backed directly by China – in the tens of millions of dollars, at the least. That’s probably just for starters.
It was, in other words, an actual money-making opportunity for the Biden connections in both Ukraine and China.
From the CHS’s FD-1023, I surmise that the timeframe of this information was between December 2015 and late March 2016.
The first meeting of the CHS with Burisma principals was apparently in December 2015 or January 2016. Narrowing that down is possible because the FD-1023 recounts a second meeting by the CHS in Vienna, with Burisma’s Mykola Zlochevsky, at which the conversation about a Burisma purchase in the U.S. resumed. The initial discussion was at the first meeting; the second in Vienna, according to the CHS, took place one or two months later about the time Joe Biden had just made news by complaining publicly about Shokin’s alleged “corruption.”
The most notable such public statement in the time period came from a Biden phone call with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on 18 February 2016.
And it was on 29 March 2016 that Viktor Shokin, target of Joe Biden’s “son of a b****” encounter with Poroshenko in December 2015, was ousted as Ukraine’s top prosecutor. The meeting in Vienna would not have been that late, or after that date.
Meanwhile, the Hunter Biden gang was meeting with emissaries and officials of China’s CEFC in the same period, December 2015 to March 2016. The timing fits neatly for a signal event in that timeline: a memo outlining a proposed venture in which CEFC would partner with Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), the Chinese-Biden investment vehicle created in 2013. The memo is documented by a text from mid-March 2016.
The bookends of the LNG saga thus look to run from late 2015, when Burisma was looking for help with the U.S. buy and brought in the CHS, to Patrick Ho’s arrest in November 2017, and Ye Jianming’s disappearance a few months later.
Unexpected connections
Digging into this had a curious shake-out. Analysis of which U.S. company was most likely under consideration for a Burisma purchase kept illuminating a path to the Obama administration, and its natural gas policies starting in 2009.
As discussed above, the emphasis by analysts so far has been on the influence-peddling aspects of the Biden family activities. That is of course a worthy and necessary emphasis.
But zooming out a bit changes the whole character of the problem-set. Burisma’s aspiration to buy a U.S. company didn’t arise in a vacuum. And if the connections uncovered by analysis tell the correct tale (something Congress needs to look into), the Biden tail wasn’t wagging anyone’s dog in the potential U.S.-Ukraine-China three-way. The big dog, wagging its own tail, was the Obama administration.
The Biden enterprises, spearheaded by their “not smart” figurehead, checked in for an opportunity probably identified by Burisma, sometime in 2015. At that point, China, having started from near-zero at the beginning of the Obama administration, was invested up to its back teeth in America’s volatile, wild-frontier natural gas industry. (Recent Hunter Biden email revelations indicate it was late 2015 when the concrete push between China’s CEFC and Rosemont Seneca ramped up for an energy project, focusing on natural gas. A good summary is here of the breadth and scope of CEFC’s connections and investment targets around the globe, as the years 2015-2017 approached.)
Diligent execution of administration policy had put Team Obama in the driver’s seat for much of that. Obama’s chief overseer and strategist for the push, a foreign affairs and energy specialist, became a close advisor to Vice President Biden on gas and other matters in late 2014.
That advisor, whom we’ll meet below, was remarkably patient – for a special envoy of Obama’s – with an apparent duty to be responsive to appeals from Hunter Biden and Biden, Inc. His name occurs in a number of emails from the Biden laptop, starting in the summer of 2014.
But from his initial posting at the State Department in 2011 to the end of Obama’s second term, this natural gas czar of the administration was working for Obama. It was Biden’s office and the door opened by his connection with Obama’s energy envoy, and Obama’s natural gas policies, that set the conditions for Biden family participation in the proposal to gratify both Ukraine and China with a Burisma natural-gas buy in the U.S.
If that’s not the lens through which you’ve been seeing Biden, Inc and its trail of suspect funding, join the club. The context, it turns out, focuses the lens differently.
Trump, Destroyer of Worlds
Before delving into that story, a few words on Trump’s approach to enterprise corruption in business dealings versus Obama’s. In assessing the motive of the U.S. “establishment” to attack Trump, it’s essential to understand what he and his agencies did differently. Much of the detail is arcane, but as with the Patrick Ho arrest – which probably wouldn’t have happened if Hillary Clinton had become president – other Trump practices also had the effect of interrupting protected arrangements that flourished in the Obama years.
Recall that Ho was charged under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In December 2019, the go-to FCPA Blog, which follows FCPA action as a specialty, noted that the years 2017-2019 had been unusually active in terms of jury trials for FCPA defendants.
The FCPA has been wielded more routinely over the years than the notorious, recently-popular FARA statute (which exists for a different purpose, of course, but makes an interesting contrast in terms of level of use). As the FCPA Blog pointed out, however, there were no jury trials for FCPA offenses in the second Obama term; i.e., 2013, 2014, 2015, or 2016. On the other hand, there was a small but distinctive spate of them starting in 2017.
That doesn’t mean FCPA charges weren’t being processed in the second Obama term. In that period, as with other prosecutions for corruption (mostly of banks involved in sanctions violations and money-laundering), cases were more likely to be settled with deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs). A massive FCPA bribery case involving French infrastructure company Alstom SA was settled in just such a manner in 2014.
In other words, trials and convictions were dispensed with. Fines and settlement agreements were the order of the day.
I’ve discussed elsewhere (e.g., here and here) the interesting arrangements of DPAs, which put federal compliance regulators inside the companies in question. What we ought to see as a moral hazard the size of an Afrimax oil tanker is treated as a pristine and inviolable scheme. But in too many cases, DPAs then fail year after year at preventing further money-laundering and corruption. This pattern was characteristic of some very high-profile cases at mega-banks HSBC and BNP Paribas. (Both banks have figured in the sprawling drama of the Biden connections overseas; e.g. here and here.)
It is of particular interest to the thesis of this article, in fact, that the Trump administration broke with the five-year-old DPA concluded by the Obama Justice Department with HSBC, choosing to let the Obama-era DPA sunset on its expiration date instead of renewing it.
The Trump DOJ also obtained a conviction on a top HSBC official in a similar case, which the Obama DOJ had declined to do in the original case, in spite of piles of evidence cited by court-watchers as conviction-worthy. HSBC had paid a $1.2 billion fine as part of its Obama-era DPA (December 2012), but no bank officers were prosecuted for the money-laundering and other alleged crimes incident to sanctions violations, terrorism, arms-running, drug-dealing, and prohibited sales to and from, among other nations, Iran.
Besides these measures, Trump’s DOJ concluded a new DPA with HSBC in 2018, after the Obama DPA expired. The Obama-selected monitoring team from the original DPA was excused at that point (see the links above and the participation of Michael Cherkasky, a player in, among other dramas, Joe Biden’s connection with MBNA bank).
This new Trump-era DPA took Hill Democrats by surprise, and left Senators Dianne Feinstein and Sherrod Brown beside themselves when they found out about it.
The basic outline of this history suggests the Trump administration was halting an Obama-era DPA practice in which at least some top Democrats were invested.
Instead, the new administration used federal law the old-fashioned way: to convict and punish offenders as opposed to setting up shop in their corporate structures. And even when it used DPAs, it was doing so in a way that frustrated longtime figures of the permanent state.
We can each guess why it would make them angry; my guess would not be that they thought the Trump administration was suddenly introducing “corruption” into the management of DPAs. More the opposite, from where I sit.
We can also guess that the arrest and indictment of Patrick Ho hit a little close to home for Team Biden. Especially when it was followed by Ye’s flight from the U.S. and disappearance into China, from which he has never reemerged to resume any dealings with the Bidens.
The echo of Uranium One: A bit-player drama on the side
Before moving on, let us note that one of the other FCPA trials in the Trump years was that of Mark Lambert, president of the Maryland-based company Transport Logistics, Inc. His trial was in November 2019. The FCPA Blog notes delicately that Lambert “was formerly the president of Maryland-based Transport Logistics Inc., which itself had pleaded guilty of bribing a Russian official in exchange for contracts to transport nuclear materials to customers in the United States.”
The Russian official was Vadim Mikerin, whose participation in bribery and kickbacks on behalf of Russian uranium interests – and involving, according to an FBI informant, the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation – went back to 2009. The earlier bribery case had been wrapped up quietly in 2015, with no blowback on the Clintons.
Lambert’s trial during the Trump administration was for 11 counts related to the same bribery scheme from 2009 onward, connecting Transport Logistics with Mikerin and the Russian firms Rosatom (which sought to purchase Uranium One in 2010, during the timeframe of the bribery scheme) and its U.S. subsidiary, Tenex.
In other words, Lambert himself was prosecuted by the Trump DOJ for bribery-related charges that had been quietly put to bed under Obama, in an action several years before, against the company and the Russian principal.
Meanwhile, as noted in the Uranium Jerky series (Part V) in 2020, the company Transport Logistics, Inc. was co-located in the same office building in Maryland with the Beltway “consulting” and investment firm Teneo Holdings, founded in 2009 and run by Clinton aides Doug Band and Declan Kelly. (Teneo is probably best remembered for being an employer of Huma Abedin at the same time she was Hillary Clinton’s aide at the State Department.) We stipulated to that co-location as a coincidence in the 2020 article, but it remains a remarkable data point.
Like the prosecution of Patrick Ho, the Lambert prosecution had to cut things a little too close for comfort, for Democrats who are aware of uniquely gigantic piles of unadjudicated evidence against them.
Trump was a disruptive interloper, from the perspective of the permanent state that makes its living off exploiting the powers of the federal government. He was using the law too much like a county sheriff – using it to straightforwardly go after crime – rather than like a DA in a Democratic-run city.
But there’s more
Beyond the Trump administration interference in “business” activities with links to Democrats, the tale gets even more interesting.
That’s because manipulating the natural gas industry, making money from margin opportunities in its resulting roller-coaster ride, and enabling cronies to buy into distressed companies at low prices was a specialty of the Obama administration.
In his 2018 book Secret Empires, Peter Schweizer referred to this brutal practice – engaged in through the power of federal regulation – as the Obama administration’s “smash and grab” strategy. It was used against other industries as well (Schweizer spends much of his time on the for-profit colleges industry). But its outlines emerged clearly, in Chapters 9 and 10 of Secret Empires, with the energy industry, and a major impact on oil, natural gas, and coal companies and the related service-industry firms that supply them with infrastructure.
To keep this tight, I will go with my frequent practice of commending the source writings to readers for additional details. The sources validate the statements made here; in a forest-and-trees situation, I want you to focus on the forest.
The smash-and-grab pattern is nicely established by Schweizer. But he didn’t pursue it in depth in the context of the initial, policy-making end of the Obama administration. Nor did we have the information in 2018 that we have today from the Hunter Biden correspondence to which the laptop was a master key.
A significant and underappreciated feature of the smash-and-grab pattern is the opportunity created to gain leverage in an industry and shape it going forward. In intent, it’s not that different from the “activist investing” model. Executing a smash-and-grab using the power of federal regulatory agencies is just a more expeditious method.
That’s important. “Smash-and-grab” in political hands will never be merely a means of making money on the shifting margins induced by regulatory shocks. Making the industry more beholden and responsive to the regulatory fist is even more important. It’s about power over industrial sectors; it’s not about leaving them to their own devices while hoping to profit from drive-by investment ventures.
Activist investing is real and indisputable. Smash-and-grab under Obama was activist investing by other means.
Please take in what I’m saying here: the practice we’re talking about isn’t about venality and insider trading, though it can involve them. It’s about much higher stakes than that. It’s about investing with regulatory turbo-boosts to create reservoirs of economic power over the direction of industry, held by regulators and their privileged cronies.
So if the Obama administration had a program to affect the natural gas industry through regulation (smash) and cultivated investment (grab), and the Biden enterprises were bringing together Ukraine and China to keep that going through “a $4 billion deal to build the f****** largest f***** LNG [liquified natural gas] port in the world” – then Trump’s DOJ arresting Patrick Ho and putting a spoke in that wheel was a much bigger deal than it might appear at first.
Following it up with a probe of the Biden dealings with Burisma in Ukraine, and running the probe outside of the Biden-protecting Justice Department, was equally big.
Burisma’s plan to buy a U.S. natural gas company wasn’t just a sleazy profit move. It was a global industry-leverage move.
If you put all of it together, it becomes very clear that the Obama administration started out with an overt policy to manipulate the natural gas industry in particular; that the administration was interested in both smashing and grabbing U.S. companies and – for a time, and to produce a specific effect – aggressively pushing natural gas development overseas; that China was invited in to consult on this policy early on; that Ukraine was among the handful of foreign countries targeted for Obama policy involvement; that Joe Biden was significantly involved in all the schmoozing that went with this policy, as a representative of the Obama presidency; that the timelines of the Obama policy development and the emergence of the Hunter Biden enterprises line up nicely; that the Hunter Biden enterprises had a common interest in gas in both Ukraine and with their Chinese investors; and that there was a liaison from the Obama administration’s gas-policy initiative in frequent contact with both Vice President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
That’s the scope of what was interrupted by Trump’s policies on trade with China, corrupt-practices prosecution, and the murky dealings of the Bidens in China and Ukraine.
Early days
We’re going to fly through this, because it’s the forest that matters. Again, read the source material for more.
Keep in mind Peter Schweizer’s findings on the smash-and-grab pattern in the Obama administration. Bear in mind the administration’s incoming hostility to “fossil” fuels, including natural gas.
Then consider an unpreviewed gas-industry development, reportedly in the spring of 2009, when CEO Aubrey McClendon of high-riding Chesapeake Energy (Oklahoma City) approached a liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing company, Cheniere Energy of Houston (with facilities in Texas and Louisiana), about the possibility of tooling up to export LNG, rather than import it. Chesapeake held a significant share of the shale-gas production by American companies. McClendon wanted to develop export markets for it. As we’ll see, the Obama administration seemingly had a different idea.
It’s interesting to note that McClendon expressed hope just before Obama’s election in 2008 that the new Democratic administration would be good for the natural gas industry. He told Bloomberg at the time, in a 28 October interview, that “The Democrats have been very engaged about compressed natural gas in the last few months. … A Democratic administration is more likely to pursue the use of CNG as a fuel.”
McClendon anticipated that Obama would make good on his vow of a windfall-profits tax on oil and restrictions on oil drilling. For the natural gas industry, McClendon thought conditions would be increasingly favorable.
Shell, like Chesapeake, approached Cheniere’s CEO, Charif Souki, in 2009 about exporting LNG. Exporting LNG would require big modifications to the Cheniere plant. If Cheniere were to tool up for it, the company would be the first one to export LNG from the Lower 48 in the U.S.
These tokens of interest from Chesapeake and Shell went against near-universal received wisdom at the time: that U.S. demand for gas would make us a net importer of LNG for the foreseeable future.
But Cheniere went ahead and applied for U.S. Department of Energy approval to prepare for exporting LNG. The equipment preparations for export from the company’s Sabine Pass terminal In Louisiana were to be extensive; Cheniere anticipated being in shape to export LNG by 2015. DOE issued its approval of Cheniere’s plan in early June 2009. (The final permit for construction and operation was issued in April of 2012.)
We’ll get back to Chesapeake Energy later; its shares were plummeting by 2010 and an Obama crony, as well as China, were making major share-block purchases by 2011. (Peter Schweizer’s eagle eye keyed on the Obama crony buys in Secret Empires. See his account on pp. 169-170 of the 2018 hardbound edition for Obama’s regulatory impact and the slumping fortunes of Chesapeake.)
Meanwhile, in June 2009, Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz, stepson of John Kerry, formed Rosemont Seneca as a private investment firm; in hindsight, laying the groundwork to profit from brokering the investment of other people’s money in enterprises over which Joe Biden, as vice president, would have influence.
Now ponder the potential import of one of the Obama administration’s earliest energy moves. If you don’t remember it (as few do today), the reaction might be a cynical disgust – a sort of “Gee whiz, of course,” given the perspective of hindsight.
On 17 November 2009, Obama and then-Chinese premier Hu Jintao announced the formation of a joint venture: the U.S.-China Shale Gas Resource Initiative. The core purpose was boosting China’s fracking capabilities.
The Obama administration touted it as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (Don’t doubt me on this. Go check it for yourself. “Reducing GHGs” became the Obama slogan for the administration’s efforts to promote fracking abroad. See the links below.) But the focus wasn’t on U.S. production, to which the administration remained relatively unfriendly. The focus was on developing foreign fracking capabilities overseas. The first candidate was China.
Obama’s shale-gas project goes global – with a twist
Next, the Obama administration announced a Global Shale Gas Initiative (GSGI) in April 2010 (notably the month of the administration’s nuclear energy summit in Washington, D.C.).
The GSGI was aggressively pushed by the Hillary Clinton State Department (see here and here). The thrust of the initiative was evangelizing the world on fracking: fracking in their back yards. Early targets, besides China, were India, Jordan, Poland, and Ukraine.
The program was later renamed the Unconventional Gas Technical Engagement Program (UGTEP), although it’s been difficult to pin down exactly when that happened. This, in fact, is a good place to observe that documentation of the program itself is curiously light, and isn’t easy to recover at the archive site of the Obama State Department.
Easily accessible government documentation is limited to a webpage at the Department of Interior site, where it is noted that the UGTEP is led by the State Department, though the DOI has a role.
The document nominally still extant at the State archive site on the original GSGI (see link at top of this section) actually had to be recovered from page saves at the Wayback Machine. It’s an information page referring only to the month of April 2010 for the launch date; the file number in the URL indicates it was posted originally in 2010. The date of the Wayback archive copy – the very first one for this page – is 26 August 2010, which lines up with the GSGI conference held in in Washington, D.C. 23-24 August 2010 (see next section below).
Follow-on reporting like that of the Wilson Center and The Intercept likewise puts the launch period only in “April 2010.” Indeed, all the reporting from the period mentions only Apil 2010, and for that matter describes the initiative as being inaugurated by the State Department, as if the Obama White House itself had nothing to do with it.
That, of course, is not possible. That’s not just theory; it’s fact. We’ll see that below – and the certainty we can have about it will be evident.
Below are screen captures of the search results in the Obama State Department archives for “Global Shale Gas Initiative” and “Unconventional Gas Technical Engagement Program.”
A link common to both sets of results is here. It’s the text of a speech by energy policy envoy Carlos Pascual in February 2012, and makes the first reference to the UGTEP. A speech by another official, Deborah A. McCarthy, in October 2011 is the last one to refer only to the GSGI. It appears the name of the initiative was changed between the two dates – probably when a new bureau was created in the State Department to work the relevant energy policies.
It was possible for CSIS fellows writing in 2014, in an article posted by the American Security Project, to trace the progress of the GSGI/UGTEP in the years following 2011. But the Obama State Department didn’t seem to want to highlight much about it at the end of the administration. Perhaps that was because promoting gas and fracking was viewed with disfavor by much of Obama’s political base. The Heidemann and Renz article is nevertheless invaluable for making clear the coincidence of actions under the shale-gas initiative and way points in the Biden, Inc. saga.
Another scholarly article by Gina Tincher, in the Energy Law Journal in April 2015, is a useful resource as well. I highlight this one because – although it doesn’t contribute much more to the timeline than the Wilson Center and Intercept pieces – it frames the question that promptly occurred to me, and that we should all ask.
In Section III Para B. starting on Journal p. 120 (PDF p. 8), Tincher outlines the purpose of the initiative.
The purpose of the program was to help countries identify and develop their unconventional natural gas resources safely and economically. By sharing U.S. federal and state governments’ technical expertise, regulatory experience, and diplomatic capabilities with “selected” countries, the State Department believed UGTEP could help achieve greater global energy security, protect environmental resources, and further U.S. economic and commercial interests. While the precise reasons behind the government’s decision to launch UGTEP (rather than leaving this to private sector investment) are hard to ascertain, it seems likely that having an official government hand in “helping” nations develop their resources could result in positive political and economic outcomes for the United States.
The question-framing observation: “While the precise reasons behind the government’s decision to launch UGTEP (rather than leaving this to private sector investment) are hard to ascertain…”
Exactly. An initiative of this kind would typically be left to private sector investment, with encouragement through a mix of agencies, prominently including Commerce, the U.S. Trade Representative, and Energy, but less cowbell from the State and Interior Departments.
“Leading” it from State, with tech assist (rather oddly) from Interior, and smash-and-grab tactics used on the industry companies, has a flavor all its own. It sounds like bureaucrats running the show: in the Obama administration, quite probably with a specific ideological agenda. Tincher didn’t have anything approaching the subsequent history of Bidens, China, and Ukraine to work with, but she keyed directly on the unique flavor.
Back to April 2010.
2010, continued
Also in April 2010, according to the laptop emails, Hunter Biden and his Rosemont Seneca associates met with Chinese businessman Che Fung “to lay the groundwork for a partnership to invest in companies in China and the United States.” The Rosemont Seneca visit to China took place 7-9 April, just before the nuclear summit in Washington.
Free Beacon elaborates: “Other emails show the Biden consortium discussing a deal with Che’s company, Ever Union Capital, to invest up to $150 million in partnership with China’s sovereign wealth fund.” The sovereign wealth fund (SWF), China Investment Corporation (CIC), had been investing intensively in commodities and natural resources throughout 2009, including in the U.S. CIC was a major investor in BlackRock and Morgan Stanley.
Emails reflect Hunter Biden excitedly referring to Che as the “super chairman,” as recounted by the Free Beacon: “‘I dont believe in lottery tickets anymore, but I do believe in the super chairman,’ Biden wrote to [Devon] Archer in a September 23, 2011, email. ‘Things are moving rapidly and the percentage he is offering me is much larger than I at first thought,’ he added.”
In May 2010, as Chesapeake shares were sliding, Aubrey McClendon raised much-needed funds with a big buy from Temasek (linked to Singapore’s SWF) and Chinese “private” equity firm Hopu. This was the first such move in Chesapeake’s increasingly troubled trajectory. Shortly thereafter, in June 2010, China Investment Corporation took out a big $1.7 billion stake in Chesapeake. That move came just weeks after Rosemont Seneca parleyed with Super Chairman Che about a joint venture with CIC.
In August 2010, a group of 17 nations, including the initial handful from April and a dozen new potential participants, came to Washington, D.C. for the first Global Shale Gas Initiative conference. Curiously, Mother Jones reported that there was a veil of secrecy over the conference: “The media was barred from attending, and officials refused to reveal basic information, including which countries took part.” Mother Jones got more information from individual State Department officials afterward, but no media attendance was allowed.
Emails exchanged to prepare for the conference revealed that the Obama National Security Council was holding a biweekly shale gas call, indicating the level of priority and engagement on the initiative. (See p. 6 in this document collection.)
Don’t miss the point that the National Security Council was holding this call, presumably on the “interagency” model. The NSC chairing such initiatives (as opposed to having the Department of Energy or another agency run them) is a reliable indicator of direct and controlling interest by the Oval Office.
Running the show
In case it’s not obvious at this point, let’s recap. In 2009, near the beginning of his presidency, Obama was making policy moves reflecting a very specific interest in natural gas. His NSC was chairing biweekly interagency calls on the matter; there’s no question that it was a key policy vector for the administration. Five months after the initiative with China was announced, an expanded initiative involving foreign shale-gas development and additional countries was announced as well. Hillary Clinton took it under her department’s wing and gave it the hard-sell treatment.
The expanded initiative would effectively compete with U.S. gas producers. Of particular interest, the GSGI/UGTEP could potentially ensure a manufactured need to import LNG (if U.S. distributors were to become customers), rather than export it as Chesapeake and Shell had discussed with Cheniere Energy.
About the time the GSGI was inaugurated, Chesapeake was finding itself in increasing difficulties, and investors from China and Singapore stepped in to purchase stakes.
Over on the Biden enterprises timeline, meanwhile, Hunter Biden set up an investment firm in 2009 with Chris Heinz. In short order (by April 2010), Hunter and his firm were chatting with a Chinese private equity maven who wanted to hook them up with the Chinese sovereign wealth fund in a $150 million venture.
This was miraculously at exactly the same time the Obama administration announced the GSGI initiative. Given the priorities of the Chinese SWF, that venture was very likely to involve commodities including natural gas.
China’s SWF would inevitably be connected to any major energy initiatives launched under presidentially-sponsored joint ventures like the U.S.-China bilateral agreement and the GSGI. It would only be a matter of time.
Enter the man
In November 2011, the Hillary Clinton State Department created a new Bureau of Energy Resources. Its chief at the time, Special Envoy Carlos Pascual, described the new bureau’s purpose as “promoting [the] energy security of the United States, but cooperating with our international partners to do that.” The Bureau became the State Department hub for hawking the GSGI/UGTEP.
One of the officials who came on to staff the Bureau was long-time energy expert Amos Hochstein (the mystery point man previewed earlier). Hochstein came from a consulting business of his own at that point, but had worked in various foreign- and trade-policy positions in the House of Representatives (including an initial stint on the House Foreign Affairs Committee) for most of the 1990s. He joined the Chris Dodd presidential campaign in 2007-08. As a consultant after the 2008 election, he lobbied for Marathon Oil, among other clients.
In the years from 2011 to 2013 Hochstein worked various portfolios in the Obama State Department’s energy-security promotion business, and in 2014 he was appointed to the top job of Special Envoy for International Energy Affairs, which put him in charge of the Bureau of Energy Resources. He took over from Carlos Pascual on 1 August 2014, and received an appointment from John Kerry in December 2014.
That puts Hochstein’s ascent to the top energy-portfolio job in context, in relation to events in the Biden timeline and Ukraine in 2014. The summary at Wikipedia, citing official and news sources at the time, describes Hochstein’s duties thus: “As the Special Envoy, Hochstein oversaw the Bureau of Energy Resources and advised Secretary of State John Kerry on global energy security and diplomacy, as well as integration of renewable and clean energy and related security matters. He also worked closely with officials at the White House’s National Security Council and other government agencies.”
Wikipedia goes on to say, “In his capacity as the U.S.’s Chief Energy Diplomat, Hochstein had an important role in shaping foreign energy and security policy and worked closely with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, accompanying him on international travel and advancing energy as a key US foreign policy tool. Hochstein and Biden worked together on the Caribbean Energy Security Initiative, Central America Energy Security Task Force, Cyprus and East Mediterranean, as well as securing Ukraine and Europe from Russian energy dominance.”
So when Hochstein’s name comes up in the Hunter Biden email correspondence, which was contemporaneous with these official Hochstein assignments, Hochstein was the Obama administration’s point man on energy resources as a foreign policy issue, and was a senior advisor to then-Vice President Biden.
The sequence of events outlined here indicates that Hochstein first cropped up in an email reference in the Hunter correspondence in “summer 2014,” when contact with him as a source of recommendations on tax advice in Ukraine was mentioned. Hunter had been seated on the board of Burisma since 12 May 2014.
Hochstein was again mentioned in communications with a Burisma employee on 31 July 2014, in response to expressions of concern from Vadym Pozharskyi about an unfavorable vote in Ukraine on taxes affecting gas producers.
Notably, that was the day before Hochstein took over the duties of Special Envoy from Carlos Pascual. It’s quite clear Burisma’s link with Hunter Biden was hooking the company in directly with the top energy-policy official of the Obama administration.
Later, on 16 April 2015, Hochstein met with Joe Biden at the White House. That same evening, VP Biden attended the dinner at Café Milano at which Pozharskyi was present, along with Hunter’s Kazakh pals (and reportedly Maria Baturina, Hunter Biden investor, and her husband Yuriy Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow).
It really isn’t possible to give credulity to any claim that Joe Biden was detached, to the point of complete unawareness, from his son’s business activities, including those relating to natural gas.
Given that Hochstein has since been appointed a special representative on energy matters for the current Biden administration, an appointment dating to 2021 (and updated with a move to the White House in 2023), the nature of his prior connections with the former vice president and Hunter Biden’s network is only clarified and confirmed by hindsight.
On that head, a photo of Joe Biden and Amos Hochstein on Air Force Two, preparing the Veep for his December 2015 visit to Ukraine and the notorious “son of a b****” transaction, is informative.
It didn’t begin or end with Biden*
But more than that, it strains credulity all to heck to try to believe the Clinton and Kerry State Department and the Obama NSC had no inkling of the Biden family’s enterprises with companies in China and Ukraine.
In fact, it’s quite likely the FBI and CIA were well aware of them, through the back door if not the front. It’s probable the Treasury Department was as well. The participants on the foreign end, such as Mykola Zlochevksy of Burisma and the Chinese business associates of Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), were the kind of entities that would routinely show up in foreign surveillance by the U.S. national security apparatus.
There would be a limit to the information that could be formally retrieved on those in communication with such contacts (i.e., metadata), but their basic activity and networks could be observed in data streams set up for foreign targets under national security letters, without requiring individual target designation to obtain FISA court authority.
Even aside from that, it wouldn’t take a very robust CIA presence at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv for the Agency to be well aware of what oligarchs and Ukrainian officials had in the kettle with the Bidens. The Ukrainian side of that equation, with its various foreign connections, was evidently under surveillance, from clues in the Russiagate/Spygate threads.
The international wirebrushing of Zlochevsky after the 2014 Russian invasion would have made him a flashing red light on Treasury’s landscape. (It evidently did so on the Justice Department’s landscape, as we saw in this article detailing the woes of Zlochevsky’s London bank account with BNP Paribas.)
And keep in mind, Ukraine and Burisma, and China and the Rosemont Seneca partners there, were all in the categories relevant to the Obama administration’s own special-interest gas project, underway since 2009. A bore-sight was already on the components of that special project. All else aside, intelligence and policy specialists in the agencies and at NSC would have been tracking their activities.
Beyond all that, by 2014 at the latest, Amos Hochstein – Obama special envoy, plugged in with John Kerry and the NSC – was being consulted by Hunter Biden’s associates in the investment and gas industries, and Hochstein was working closely with Joe Biden.
If the Obama administration was unaware of what was going on with Hochstein, Burisma, the Bidens, and China, it would probably be the first such entity in human history to be so. At a minimum, the NSC basically is the administration when it comes to such matters. The gas energy portfolio at issue here was one of many Obama administration issues worked by an NSC overloaded with personnel and resources, to a greater extent than in any presidency since the NSC was formed in 1947.
Note as this goes to post: America First Legal Foundation is just previewing “over 1000” V.P. Joe Biden emails from the National Archives that mention Rosemont Seneca. Apparently more are coming.
One of the interactions showed Hunter Biden and Rosement Seneca being closely involved with the China State Luncheon in January 2011; i.e., the state luncheon held during the visit when Hu Jintao and President Obama announced their update with new developments in the U.S.-China Shale-Gas Initiative (see next section).
More email revelations are certain to document more White House-Rosemont Seneca interaction on energy issues, and very probably on events relevant to this story of this article.
A moment’s thought also clarifies that Biden’s aides, including NSC staffers, were well aware because of those now-archived emails of the Rosemont Seneca connection to Obama’s industry and foreign affairs policies.
Update to note: Target identified. This is where any “smoking guns” on specific transactions will be.
Back to 2011
The Biden, Inc. money moves in 2010 and 2011 didn’t appear to particularly emphasize energy investment. The joint proposals discussed with investors in China, Russia, and other countries had as much to do with real estate and other ventures.
But in the natural gas industry, things were hopping. President Obama and Hu Jintao had another summit meeting in January 2011 at which a laundry list of energy initiatives was laid out pursuant to the original cooperation shale-gas cooperation agreement of November 2009. One of them produced an agreement between Chesapeake Energy and the China national oil and gas company (CNOOC) to develop several U.S. gas fields. This agreement entailed a $1.8 billion investment by CNOOC, and as a Motley Fool article opined in July 2011, Chesapeake would probably have the inside track on additional cooperation with list items related to fracking development in China.
Keep in mind that both sides of that equation were being encouraged by the Obama administration’s twin initiatives from 2009 and 2010: the U.S.-China Shale Gas Initiative, and the Global Shale Gas initiative.
But Chesapeake Energy’s participation had come out of necessity, through taking on Chinese investment due to plummeting revenues at home and declining company share values. None of it was what McClendon had envisioned in the enthusiastic days of 2008.
Meanwhile, as Peter Schweizer noted in Secret Empires (p. 170; citation above), Obama crony John Rogers, a “value investor” through his firm Ariel Investments, came in behind China’s sovereign wealth fund and CNOOC and bought 1.6 million shares of Chesapeake Energy in the second quarter of 2011, for a total of $47 million. (Schweizer documents Rogers, a financial supporter of Obama’s political career, as a frequent flyer in the smash-and-grab program.)
China was getting hooks in Chesapeake by the indirect route as well. Looking to the following year, 2012, China Investment Corporation bought a significant minority stake in the investment firm EIG Partners, which was a key backer of Chesapeake (the company backed Chesapeake’s IPO in 1993).
Notably, though, in June 2011, a U.S. gas industry forum affirmed once again that imports of LNG, not exports, were expected to be the industry mainstay for the foreseeable future.
However, Cheniere Energy, aspiring exporter of LNG, was plowing ahead with plans for its retooling effort at the Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana. At the same 2011 forum, an executive of French company GDF Suez (now Engie) pointed out that the U.S. now had two such projects underway, the one at Sabine Pass and a second one close by in Freeport, Texas (which at the time was 30% owned by Cheniere). If both terminals got up and running in the 2010s, the U.S. would have the capacity to be the world’s second-largest exporter of LNG, just behind Qatar. Should LNG export come under the patronage of an activist presidential administration, industry opportunities would obvious.
At least one major industry player – Chesapeake – had been smashed and grabbed out of initiative and autonomy in that regard, after approaching Cheniere on the same opportunity some two years before. Instead of moving its U.S.-drilled gas to world markets through a Cheniere hook-up that McClendon and Cheniere’s Souki might have originally arranged on their own say-so, Chesapeake was now subject, in choosing its options, to investors from China and the Obama “favorites” circle.
Aubrey McClendon, who’d been so optimistic about the Obama administration back in 2008, had a very different view by 2012. Far from being a boon to natural gas, Obama’s anti-fracking stance was hitting the U.S industry hard, causing it to reorganize and beg for capital from predatory investors.
In a bright spot, in October 2011 Cheniere won its first LNG export contract with Britain’s BG Group Plc (later bought by Royal Dutch Shell in 2016). As mentioned earlier, exports were not expected to commence until 2015. But the contract in hand improved Cheniere’s attractiveness for investment.
Unsurprisingly, however, Cheniere itself would have to go the Chinese investment route in the next year, as its own shares declined in the down market fostered by the Obama administration. Charif Souki, like McClendon something of a wildcat, as was once common in the natural gas industry, had been the best-compensated CEO in America when Cheniere was riding high only a few years before. But by 2012, money was tight. China was on the horizon.
Again, remember: the gas connection between Obama’s U.S. and China wasn’t an unguided market development. It was fostered by those two Obama shale-gas initiatives of 2009 and 2010, and the biweekly conference calls that tended them at the NSC.
As Cheniere labored for the LNG export tool-up, the company got $2 billion for the Sabine Pass project with a buy from Blackstone in May 2012. Blackstone, of course, had famously been a key investment target of China since a $3 billion deal in 2007. (After a rocky start between Obama and Blackstone in his first term, Blackstone became a backer, with a top executive holding a high-profile fundraiser for Obama in the 2012 election cycle.)
And in August 2012, China and Singapore made another joint move (like the one on Chesapeake in 2010), agreeing to invest $500 million each in Cheniere from their SWFs.
Enthusiasm for Cheniere continued to ramp up. In February 2013, Blackstone, in conjunction with China’s (nominal) private equity firm RRJ Capital, sank another $300-odd million into the company.
But then came a turn. By September 2013, Cheniere was floating its own IPO to raise $690 million from U.S.-market investors. The timing of this interesting course change is noteworthy, as we’ll see a bit further below.
The fate of the superfluous
In February 2013, Chesapeake sold a $1 billion stake in an Oklahoma-Kansas gas field to China’s Sinopec oil and gas company, a telling swan song for Aubrey McClendon.
On 1 April 2013, McClendon, the company’s founder, was ousted from his CEO position by the board of Chesapeake Energy. There’s all kinds of backstory on that, which we don’t have time for. It’s easy enough to find with web searches. McClendon the wildcat didn’t do everything by the debt-and-leverage textbook; much of it can legitimately be seen as his fault.
But what put him on the skids was the domestic gas policy of the Obama administration. And what’s of greater interest is, first of all, the point that once his company had been basically dragooned into the Obama shale-gas initiative, McClendon’s vision and initiative were shouldered out as factors. Chesapeake’s fortunes were placed in the stewardship of investors who essentially wanted to exploit its resources.
The other point of interest is that the instrument for getting him ousted was Carl Icahn. We’ll see why that matters in just a moment.
McClendon did not go quietly into that good night. He took off for the hills and formed a new company, American Energy Partners, which he quickly overleveraged but which had a number of projects underway at the time of his accidental death in a car crash in Oklahoma City some three years later (in 2016). Shortly before his demise, the U.S. DOJ brought non-compete price-fixing charges against him dating to his tenure as CEO of Chesapeake Energy.
In an odd coincidence, Charif Souki – who remains alive and well – was also ousted as CEO of his company, Cheniere, once the Chinese investment tally had mounted to retool the Sabine Pass terminal for LNG export. The Chinese investment started in earnest in 2012, and in December 2015 the Cheniere board voted to remove him.
The basis for removal was reportedly a difference of opinion on how much future revenue could be expected from contracts to export natural gas, and how to use the anticipated flow.
The instrument of Souki’s removal from the board? Carl Icahn (see link).
That’s some fierce pattern there. Chesapeake and Cheniere were both known, before Obama took office, for the success they had achieved under their independent-minded, somewhat colorful and unconventional founders. They had conferred early on about one of the most important industry projects to emerge from the last decade: exporting LNG from the U.S. Both companies were of core significance to Obama’s twin shale-gas initiatives, and they ended up smashed and grabbed by Chinese investors by the beginning of his second term.
In each case, it took about three years from the onset of the Chinese investment (2010-2013 for Chesapeake, 2012-2015 at Cheniere) for the founder to be ousted – by Carl Icahn. (If I’m ever going to get this posted, I simply don’t have time to go down the Icahn rat-hole for clues on that coincidence, other than Icahn’s well-known china-breaking buyouts.)
Ultimately, Chesapeake appears to have been targeted for its size and prominence at the time Obama took office. But anyone can heave out the gas; Cheniere was the more unique property, with its ownership of one prospective LNG export terminal conveniently located on the Gulf of Mexico, and significant interest in another.
The maneuvers in Obama’s two terms had the interesting effect of first seeming to emphasize the opposite of exporting LNG from the U.S., instead focusing on developing shale gas overseas. If anything, the prospect appeared to be of going with received wisdom in the industry and gearing up to import natural gas into the United States.
In the end, however, the administration’s moves got the leadership changed at Cheniere, and ensured that China was heavily invested in Cheniere’s LNG export enterprise. American investors through Blackstone gained considerable leverage as well.
And that brings us to the timeline from September 2013, when Cheniere was allowed to stretch its muscles beyond Chinese investment and launch a U.S.-market IPO, to the critical timeframe of the Burisma deliberations on acquiring a U.S. gas company, bookended by December 2015 and March 2016.
The critical juncture
Before laying that out, one brief note about Charif Souki. After leaving Cheniere, he started another new company of his own, Tellurian Investments. I promise, you want to know that. It will come up again.
Now to the timeline. Most of the events of the period in question – mid-2013 to March 2016 – are extremely well known by now. Some aren’t quite as well known. Major way points include:
- Mykola Zlochevsky’s preparations to park Burisma money outside Ukraine by opening his BNP Paribas account in London (summer of 2013);
- A progress update on the U.S. -China gas cooperation initiative (here, and here), with specific references to LNG export from the U.S. and access to national pipeline networks, issued in July 2013 (see Heidemann and Renz);
- Formation of Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd. (BHR), controlled by the Bank of China, in November 2013;
- A press release from the Obama White House on 5 December 2013, stating that (as Heidmann and Renz put it in the American Security Project article referenced above) “to ameliorate U.S.-China economic relations, the U.S. would encourage technology exports for the purpose of shale gas exploration and development in China”;
- Hunter Biden’s visit to China with Joe Biden on 5 December 2013;
- Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2014;
- Zlochevsky’s flight from Ukraine in February 2014;
- As described by Heidemann and Renz in their article at the American Security Project, “the Chinese National Oil Companies (NOCs) – Sinopec and CNPC – suddenly became highly optimistic about future production prospects, even increasing their individual production targets” in March 2014 (emphasis added);
- Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine to promote natural gas cooperation, including prospects for fracking in Ukraine, in April 2014;
- Burisma naming Hunter Biden to its board in April 2014, and Hunter taking his seat in May 2014 (Devon Archer was also placed on the board in the same period);
- Chinese statements (recounted by Heidemann and Renz) in June 2014, in which Xi Jinping emphasized the transformational significance of natural gas in China’s energy future, and state official Niu Liu “stressed that shale gas production could be a step towards this much needed energy revolution”;
- Amos Hochstein’s appointment as Obama’s Special Envoy for International Energy Affairs in August 2014, and beginning of a close working relationship with Joe Biden;
- The Bidens’ meeting with a cast of Bidengate characters at Café Milano in April 2015, preceded on the same day by Joe Biden’s meeting with Amos Hochstein;
- A move by CEFC in October 2015, when a business consultant, Scott Oh, approached Hunter Biden on CEFC’s behalf with a proposal for a $100 million investment project;
- CEFC’s Ye Jianming and Hunter Biden making first contact on 7 December 2015;
- Then-Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Ukraine for the “son of a b****” encounter with Petro Poroshenko, also on 7 December 2015;
- Charif Souki’s ouster from Cheniere Energy on 13 December 2015;
- Burisma’s discussions with a third-party consultant about arranging to buy a U.S. gas company, which took place between December 2015 and February 2016;
- The first export shipment of LNG from Cheniere’s Sabine Pass terminal in February 2016;
- Dismissal of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, in March 2016.
But something is missing. It’s the something that solidifies why many analysts have focused on Cheniere as the likely target of the Burisma purchase proposal.
And it developed in exactly this timeframe.
The little drama in question was a remarkable movement of Obama and Biden political alumni to Cheniere Energy.
Company takeover
When Daniel Greenfield’s article appeared highlighting Burisma’s interest in buying a U.S. company, Internet sleuth @Pimpernell13 (ThunderB) promptly wondered if it might not be Cheniere Energy.
And we might well wonder that, given the shift of officials and lobbyists with ties to Obama and Biden starting in 2013 (see here and here).
Heather Zichal is perhaps the best known. Zichal had been an advisor to Senator John Kerry a few years before joining Obama’s staff as Deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change. In October 2013, she announced her intention to leave that position. Her next appearance was on the board of directors for Cheniere Energy, an appointment that ran from June 2014 to 2018.
As subsequent reporting has noted, Zichal met several times with officers of Cheniere Energy at the White House before leaving and taking a spot on the company’s board. (Cheniere also took the precaution, like Burisma, of becoming a high-level donor to the Atlantic Council, with which Zichal took a position in 2016. Both Zichal and Cheniere were donors to Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.)
Zichal was later named Biden’s climate advisor for the 2020 presidential campaign.
Another is Ankit Desai, a former political director for Senator Joe Biden. Desai had also worked for John Kerry – who as secretary of state played a key role in the Obama natural gas promotions – at the same time as Heather Zichal, and during the Obama administration was a policy author for the Democratic Party. In 2013, Desai became a vice president at Cheniere Energy, serving in that role until 2017.
Since leaving Cheniere, Desai has reappeared as a lobbyist and advisor to the CEO of energy company Tellurian Investments, Charif Souki. (Told ya. But wait; there’s more on Tellurian. See below.)
There was an interesting connection to a third Cheniere executive, David Thames, who at the time was a senior vice president of the company, and was “President of wholly-owned Cheniere Marketing LLC, where he was responsible for Cheniere’s commercial activities and its LNG trading business.”
Thames’s current biography describes it thus: “In this role [with Cheniere Marketing] he developed the commercial model for Sabine Pass Liquefaction and led the team that negotiated and entered into its sales and purchase agreements.”
The biography goes on to extol the following: “Mr. Thames later became Cheniere’s Chief Financial Officer and led the initial public offering of Cheniere Energy Partners Holdings LLC, the proceeds of which were used as equity capital to launch Cheniere’s Corpus Christi LNG export project.” (Note, for completeness, that Cheniere had sold off its 30% interest in the Freeport, Texas LNG facility prior to that IPO. The Corpus Christi [Texas] terminal was to be Cheniere’s own project to expand terminal capacity, to eventually become the world’s largest hub for LNG export.)
The Thames-honchoed IPO would appear to be the 2013 Cheniere IPO we looked at earlier. A Seeking Alpha summary in October 2014 describes the investment vehicle with that exact name – Cheniere Energy Partners Holdings LLC – as the most recent from Cheniere. The timing of the IPO after the negotiations Thames honchoed for LNG sales and purchase agreements, and after he became CFO of Cheniere, point to the IPO previewed in the second half of 2013.
Mr. Thames thus was hands-on involved in each of the principal activities that developed Cheniere as a unique LNG export property.
All of these factors, including the Cheniere Energy Partners Holdings LLC IPO – after a course of pump-up purchases by China-backed investors – are very interesting when laid out together.
Perhaps the most interesting link, however, is with Andrew Goldman, a Biden aide from his senatorial days, with whom Thames later founded another gas company, Western LNG, in 2015. Thames left Cheniere to start this venture, which was founded to develop an LNG export facility in Canada.
Thames remains president and CEO of the company he founded. Goldman is no longer with Western LNG (he was still listed in prospectus literature in 2018), but he and Joe Biden took some heat during the 2020 election cycle when Goldman hosted a fundraiser for Biden.
What are the odds a senatorial aide of Joe Biden’s just happened to found an LNG company with the Cheniere executive who shepherded Cheniere through the LNG-export preparations made during the Obama administration?
The odds seem to increase, at a minimum, that Cheniere was the U.S. company Burisma was looking to purchase. Throw in another Cheniere board member (at the time) with high-level Democratic ties – John Deutch, former CIA director under Bill Clinton – and the oddsmaking gets even more interesting. (On that head, it’s also interesting to recall that former CIA officer J. Cofer Black was added to the board of Burisma in February 2017. That has, at the least, the whiff of leaving nothing to chance.)
Rounding things out, one more in our cast of characters joined Charif Souki’s Tellurian Investments after the Obama administration left office. Ankit Desai, as we’ve seen, became an advisor to Tellurian. In March 2017, energy czar and Biden aide Amos Hochstein accepted a position as executive vice president at Tellurian. (The advantage of hooking up with Souki’s new outfit would be Souki’s prior connections with Cheniere. While the Obama administration seemed to treat Aubrey McClendon as a nuisance to be rid of, Charif Souki appears to have retained a level of industry viability by keeping his ties with Cheniere intact after the force-out in 2015.)
The story so far
To reiterate a point I’ve made many times before, what we’ve considered here is not a trail of smoking guns.
But complex enterprises of this kind, including prosecutable RICO enterprises, rarely if ever evince smoking guns that are visible to the public, or visible without the kind of investigation only law enforcement has to tools to conduct.
Sifting facts like these – highly indicative connections and timelines – is how potential RICO cases are identified and referred for deeper probing.
And as an experienced intelligence officer would verify, all you’d need is one to two workdays with a trove of communications metadata to get warrant-ready. This one has “metadata magnet” written all over it.
The summary is telling at this point.
A new perspective
We’ve essentially been looking at this whole thing backwards. We’ve come at it from the perspective of the Biden connection with Burisma, and recently our discovery of the Burisma proposal to buy a U.S. natural gas company, which involved the Bidens. Equally, on the China side, we’ve been mesmerized by the Biden connections with Chinese investment vehicles, including CEFC, and the strange episode with Patrick Ho going to jail and Ye Jianming disappearing.
But if we look at it from “frontward,” it starts to fall into place. We can see that Joe Biden and family were in the middle of a key thread in a larger saga. But they weren’t the prime movers. They appear to have embedded in the thread to serve the interests of the actual prime mover: the Obama administration, with its policy moves on fracking overseas and LNG export, partially executed with the smash-and-grab technique so well analyzed by Peter Schweizer.
In Obama’s second term, the smash-and-grab projects being well underway, loyal Democrats moved into key positions with one of the smash-and-grab targets: a uniquely valuable LNG company, Cheniere Energy. If a company had been set up to be purchased by Burisma – probably with vested interest from China, but with plenty of opportunity for U.S. investors to profit directly – it was Cheniere.
The Bidens were presumably looking to make money off their embedded position. But they weren’t the “why” of it all.
The “why” is starkly visible in hindsight, with a line from the Obama-Hu shale-gas agreement of November 2009 to Hunter Biden blurting out his complaint in May 2018 after CEFC’s Ho and Ye were taken off the board: that he had lost out on “a $4 billion deal to build the f****** largest f***** LNG [liquified natural gas] port in the world.”
Perhaps not a smoking gun. Perhaps a gun with a round in the chamber, on which the trigger didn’t have a chance to be pulled.
The Trump-era kicker (wait; there’s still more)
The Trump DOJ, with a Corrupt Practices case, had eliminated Patrick Ho by the end of 2017, and Ye Jianming’s exit occurred shortly thereafter in 2018. The Biden connections appeared dead at that point for putting together an LNG enterprise involving China and Burisma.
Then Rudy Giuliani started sniffing around the Biden activities from the Obama era in Ukraine – the ones Joe Biden had gotten Viktor Shokin dismissed in 2016 so they wouldn’t be sniffed around. By July 2019, President Trump himself was discussing investigation of those activities with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, apparently with clear understanding on both ends of what the topic was. Board positions with Burisma had been terminated: Devon Archer had already left his, and Hunter Biden resigned his when Joe Biden declared his 2020 candidacy in April 2019. Burisma too was a dead letter for the Bidens.
But invoking the ministrations of law enforcement wasn’t the only thing Trump’s administration had done after he took office instead of Hillary Clinton.
Set the final scene with a Hunter Biden email to Gongnwen Dong, a business associate of CEFC’s Ye Jianming who was an officer of the Hunter-connected enterprises Hudson West III, Hudson West IV, and Hudson West V.
H/t: @cbensonhunt
Hunter did business on energy projects through the Hudson West vehicles, and in this email he promotes plans for CEFC investment in an LNG project involving, explicitly, Cheniere Energy, whose Louisiana LNG terminal he highlights in the pitch. Contracts for LNG export from the terminal complex in the Gulf are the other feature of Hunter’s vision.
On the China side of Hunter’s correspondence, Cheniere and its LNG terminals come up a number of times; it’s clear Hunter wanted to broker Chinese CEFC investment in Cheniere. (Remember, prior Chinese investment had been through CIC – the SWF – and nominal private equity firms. Indirect investment came through Blackstone.)
The date of the email: 8 November 2017, a Wednesday.
In for the kill
We have no way of knowing from out here how wittingly Trump swept aside the Bidens’ apparent Obama-era plan to leverage Joe and Hunter Biden’s connections for a piece of the f****** largest f***** LNG [liquified natural gas] port in the world.
But whether Trump did the following with a quizzical grin on his face or not, what we can see is why the invested parties would hate him so much.
On Thursday 9 November 2017, the Trump State Department announced a U.S.-China agreement, signed between Cheniere Energy and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), for long-term LNG purchases by China and cooperation on other joint ventures. The agreement was part of a package blessed by Trump and Xi Jinping during Trump’s visit to China that week.
The Obama administration had reshaped Cheniere over a period of years, starting in 2009, and had worked hard to build up U.S.-China cooperation on shale gas throughout Obama’s two terms. Partly by promoting fracking overseas, especially to an eager China, and partly by clamping down on fracking in the United States – two measures with painful impact on the economic viability of U.S. gas – Obama had smashed and grabbed key players in the U.S. gas industry as a means of gaining leverage over the industry’s future course.
The Biden family had then, from 2014 to 2017, put a lot of effort into exploiting these developments to broker a big deal involving China’s CEFC, Hunter Biden’s investment vehicles, Cheniere Energy, and very probably Burisma in Ukraine.
From the Trump-Xi deliberations in November 2017, however, CNPC, not the Bidens’ partner CEFC, walked off with a payoff: contracts and project plans with long-term Obama project Cheniere Energy. (If there has been any CEFC investment in the oil and gas companies’ projects with Cheniere, it hasn’t gone through the Biden enterprises.)
Nine days later, Patrick Ho of CEFC was arrested in New York. Although Hunter continued to correspond hopefully on a CEFC deal through February 2018, Ye Jianming went missing in March 2018, and has not been heard from since.
Coda
In February 2018, Cheniere and CNPC inked the contract previewed by the Trump-Xi cooperation announcement (link below). The contract, representing billions of dollars in value, is for 1.2 million tons of LNG per year through 2043.
In early March 2019, China’s Sinopec also signed an $18 billion deal with Cheniere Energy for LNG to be exported through Cheniere’s facilities in Louisiana and Texas.
To date, no investment in Cheniere by CEFC or involving the Biden-linked investment firms has been reported.
* This is as good a place as any to drop a promissory footnote. A side-drama there’s no space for in this article involves an attempt to start a narrative in the 2019-2020 timeframe that the Trump administration was engaged in corrupt dealings in Ukraine; basically, a mirror image of what the Bidens had done, and even involving some of the same players.
The narrative had the classic earmarks, to coin an expression, of the Fusion GPS Special, and made a point of trying to revolve around former Texas governor Rick Perry, Trump’s Secretary of Energy. A peek into it came from an op-ed published by Amos Hochstein in the Kyiv Post in October 2020. In 2017, Hochstein had joined the board of Ukraine’s state natural gas enterprise, Naftogaz, and in October 2020 he announced he was leaving the board due to corruption problems, which he darkly hinted, just before the November 2020 election, were linked to the Trump administration.
That saga will be worth writing about another day. It appears that its sputtering flameout in the media was due to the Biden win in the 2020 election, which apparently obviated further pursuit of the narrative. (The releases of Hunter Biden emails have demonstrated in the last several months that some figures implicated in the anti-Trump narrative were actually in the Obama-Biden orbit – a continuing pattern with the whole massive steam calliope of the “Ukraine” epic.)
Feature image: Trump, Destroyer of worlds.
The Optimistic Conservative 
Brilliant work. Thank you.
Whew. Now one can understand why the Obama and Biden administrations suck so horribly at running the nation. They’re so busy enriching themselves that they barely have a minute to do their actual job. How is a plain Deputy Assistant to Undersecretary for Special Envoy to InterDepartmental Adjutant Coordinator to Task Force for Oversight to Project Integration for Central American anti-Counter-Surveillance Administration to do his job, when he has all this corrupt coordination on his plate? TOC has proven that he can write faster than I can read. I feel like someon who just binge-watched an entire season of the Sopranos.
As for the FBI knowing what Hunter was up to, they had a FISA on the frickin Chinese spy chief, Ho.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/03/15/the_biden_justice_department_stands_accused_of_hiding_this_evidence_of_biden-china_corruption_887223.html#!
Also, there is more detailed info on Obama’s smash and grabs in Schweitzer’s “Extortion”.
Great write up!
Thanks, BitterC. I’m nor sure why your comment went to approval; the filter is supposed to accept approved commenters with up to two hyperlinks in a comment. I was notified someone else was having a problem getting access to the WordPress page for commenting purposes, so there may have been a site-wide problem.
Appreciate the tip on Extortion. That’s one I don’t have yet. Schweizer does a good job on smash-and-grab, and in fact cued me to pursue the one executed against Chesapeake Energy. That turned out to be highly relevant when the info about McClendon and Souki conferring on LNG export in early 2009 came up. That was the kind of industry move the Obama ideologues wouldn’t want to leave to the companies themselves. Controlling industry is more important even than profiting from it, for the commercial interventions of the “permanent state.”
Very few seem to be aware of that, however. Again, as in the text: the motive to gain control of major companies and steer industry trends is clearly evident in the political/ideological phenomenon of activist investment (buying big share blocks, usually through investment firms – like BlackRock and Vanguard – and leveraging the shareholder power to extort the investment targets in their corporate decision-making). If activist-investment raiders will do it that way, people with the same activist perspective will certainly do it the smash-and-grab way, using the power of government regulation while their left-wing running mates hold such power.
Good info on the FISA auth on Ho. I assumed they’d have it on Ho, Ye, both, and/or surveillance going under NSLs on contacts of either one from deeper in the CCP hierarchy. The certainty of that is obvious.
Re: Extortion. It was more about how Congress and Obama shake down industries with the threat of regulation. The Obama aspect was about how he destroyed industries so his friends (his girls were too young) to buy stock on the cheap than about the control aspect. Nice pickup on that aspect, btw. I think Schweitzer was more concerned about the money side
Welcome to the newcomers, and apologies for delays in comment “approvals.” As long as users don’t come in with different email addresses, there should only be one approval needed, for the first comment. Glad to have you here, and don’t be strangers.
Great work! Any chance you can get it to Rep Dan Bishop, who was key in the 20 negotiations w/ McCarthy for the gavel, sits on Judiciary, and close to T45? Perhaps Lee Smith or Kash can help. What was Ezra Cohen-Watnick doing (for T45?) between August 2017 and April 2018?
My absence is due to tough year(s) – glad I read this.
It’s really good to see you again, D4x. I was hoping your absence wasn’t due to anything worse than tough year(s). Continued prayers for endurance and as much healing as may be possible.
We’ll see how far we can get this. I’m pretty sure Lee Smith has seen it, though I haven’t discussed it with him. I’m aware of paths people have told me about by which my work gets to members of Congress, and suspect this article has been by some, though that’s not confirmed.
As Desert Rain mentions, the Cheniere connections in Texas have quite probably made the Obama-Cheniere saga of interest to Texas politics. I don’t know that I’ve seen any linked to the kangaroo court convened for Paxton, but as mentioned in the footnote, there was a major effort by Dems and media in 2019-20 to call some of the Cheniere-related interactions nefarious and try to hang them on Rick Perry. So there’s a better than average chance of awareness by Texas politicians, at the least.
Ezra Cohen went from the Trump NSC in August 2017 to work for Oracle. I noted a bit later (when a report on that came out) that that’s exactly where you’d send someone who was going to investigate Spygate from the inside. The structured databases used by NSA and NSA customers were under Oracle contract for years, and Oracle administered other aspects of the IT mechanisms (connection to the Intel community clouds) that would make it a particularly fruitful place to get employment.
Can’t speculate beyond that, but those points are unclassified.
Thanks so much for your reply! In 2023, one activity I had to drop was reading tweets, but, I remembered Lee Smith reads yours. I did resume my disqus comments at ‘plb’, where one, who always reads my links, commenter’s nephew is in the House. He has said he never discusses politics, but, I did stealthily share this link, just in case. (My ‘stealth tactic’ is to upload my bird metaphor image so you have to click to “see more”.) I did not want to start a discussion there.
Paxton’s post acquittal letter is a scorcher! I was totally offline July-Dec 2019, unable to read any more fake news even in headlines, and missed Perry’s resignation.
Thanks for Ezra going to Oracle. If anyone could find the evidence, it’s Ezra. Probably helps explain why Nakasone dug in when Ezra, Kash, and Chris Miller went to DoD.
Not sure I’ll live to see the great unravelling reveal. Came back online in April2023 as a distraction from my physical reality.
Thanks again!
Cheniere and Tellurian are each headquartered in Texas. Would not be surprised to read of ties to motives behind current charges against Texas AG Ken Paxton.