An adviser to President Trump says he was given information on Hunter Biden’s business dealings during a visit to Beijing but can’t seem to keep his story straight.
Michael Pillsbury, an informal White House adviser on China, first told Fox Business he brought up the Bidens during his trip last week, the same week Trump publicly encouraged China to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
“I tried to bring up the topic in Beijing,” Pillsbury said. “I’ve never seen them get so secretive in my entire life. They would discuss ICBM warheads sooner than talk about what Hunter Biden was doing in China with [former] Vice President Biden.”
He then told the Financial Times, “I got a quite a bit of background on Hunter Biden from the Chinese.” But during an interview on C-SPAN, Pillsbury claimed he had not spoken to the London-based outlet for a month.
This prompted Financial Times‘ Washington bureau chief Demetri Sevastopulo to post to Twitter a screen shot of his email exchange with Pillsbury from Wednesday.
Apparently Mike (@mikepillsbury) denied on C-Span that he told me this (https://t.co/xlKuY17OUk).
But here is the email exchange with him last night (and our story: https://t.co/BQgi3TcH1y). https://t.co/8p4Ohcg7vI pic.twitter.com/FEK8LaOgBM
— Demetri Sevastopulo (@Dimi) October 10, 2019
Pillsbury is the director for Chinese strategy at the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank, and an author of multiple books on China. In other interviews, Pillsbury said the information he received while in China stemmed from a request for a new book on the U.S.-China relationship. He claimed most if not all of the information he was given about the Bidens was already publicly available.
He told McClatchy that what he received was “just from the newspaper stories — nothing new.” Pillsbury also denied receiving any direction from the president. “I have never had any conversation with President Trump about this at anytime,” he said.
Trump has alleged China made a corrupt “payoff” to Hunter Biden when his father was vice president. “Biden’s son walks out of China with $1.5 billion in a fund, and the biggest funds in the world can’t get money out of China, and he’s there for one quick meeting and he flies in on Air Force Two, I think that’s a horrible thing. I think it’s a horrible thing,” the president said recently.
Biden, who is a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, responded to Trump, saying, “This is not about me, it’s not about my son. There’s not a shred of evidence of anything that was wrong.”
Beijing has rejected Trump’s call for China to “start an investigation” into the Biden family. “We have no intention of intervening in the domestic affairs of the United States. Our position is consistent and clear,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Tuesday.
Trump pressuring another country, Ukraine, to investigate the Bidens prompted an impeachment by House Democrats.
