Trump Adviser Claims Chinese Gave Him ‘Quite a Bit of Background’ on Hunter Biden

Tobias Hoonhout

Michael Pillsbury, the director for Chinese strategy at the D.C.-based Hudson Institute think tank and one of President Trump’s advisers on China, told The Financial Times that he’d asked Chinese officials about Hunter Biden’s dealings in the country and gotten “quite a bit of background” in response.

Pillsbury, whom President Trump once called “probably the leading authority on China,” first claimed on-air with Fox Business Channel’s Lou Dobbs that he brought up Hunter Biden during a visit to Beijing last week.

“I have never seen them get so secretive in my life,” he said. “They would discuss ICBM warheads rather than talk about what Hunter Biden was doing in China with Vice President Biden. That is a big area now where the Chinese know they don’t want any American probe into what happened with Hunter Biden.”

The Times then reported that Pillsbury had confirmed the story to its reporter, and quoted him as saying he’d gotten “quite a bit of background” on the younger Biden’s dealings from his Chinese contacts. Last week President Trump said in a press conference that “China should start an investigation into the Bidens.”

Pillsbury later backtracked, telling C-Span that he hadn’t “spoken to the Financial Times for a month.” But Demetri Sevastopulo, the Times‘s Washington bureau chief, subsequently took to Twitter to post a picture of an email exchange with Pillsbury from yesterday.

Pillsbury replied by telling the Washington Post that everything he’d learned “was already public or well-known,” and reiterating that the Chinese “really, really didn’t want to talk about” Hunter Biden.

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