A Hunter Biden associate has told House impeachment investigators that President Biden attended meetings with his son’s foreign business partners after he left the vice presidency. The associate also said that the foreign partners, who ran a Communist Chinese energy firm, believed they were buying access to the Biden family name. 

“I’m certain Ye was there,” the associate, Rob Walker, said of a meeting the elder Mr. Biden had at the Four Seasons at Washington with the chairman of the Chinese energy firm, CEFC. Mr. Walker says the CEFC chairman, Ye Jianming, attended the meeting with the Bidens because “we were still discussing ways we could work together.”

Mr. Walker told investigators that he and the Bidens — including Hunter Biden and the president’s brother, James — began working with CEFC in 2015 and 2016, while the elder Mr. Biden was still serving as vice president. Mr. Walker said that James Biden was working on developing an oil and gas project in Oman with CEFC executives, while other Biden family members and associates were pushing for the development of a project in Colombia. 

The then-former vice president did not explicitly talk business with his son or CEFC executives. Rather, he made a short appearance to exchange “pleasantries,” wished his son and the Chinese businessmen “good luck,” and then promptly left. 

Mr. Walker asserts that it was the Biden family name that got those CEFC officials in the door with regulators and American policymakers. His statements echo those of other impeachment inquiry witnesses, who have detailed how the first son’s selling of “the illusion of access” to the levers of power was enough to win him millions of dollars in foreign payments. 

GOP investigators have been seeking evidence of criminal conduct: evidence that bought access to the Biden name actually led to government policy actions that benefited Hunter and James Biden’s foreign clients. 

When asked about Hunter Biden’s role and responsibilities in their work, Mr. Walker said “he had an interesting last name that would probably get people in the door.”

After the elder Mr. Biden left office on January 20, 2017, a payment of $3 million was sent from a CEFC-related firm, State Energy HK, to Mr. Walker. He held on to the funds in a limited liability company, Robinson Walker LLL. 

Over the course of several months, Mr. Walker sent incremental payments to Hunter Biden, James Biden, and Beau Biden’s widow, Hallie Biden, Hunter’s then-girlfriend. Those payments totaled more than $1 million, with another million dollars going to another business partner and the rest remaining with Mr. Walker. 

Mr. Walker also worked on a separate deal with a Romanian businessman, Gabriel Popoviciu, with whom Hunter Biden worked on a real estate development project known as Banaesa. That project involved building hotels in Africa. 

Mr. Popoviciu — who was under investigation for “abuse of power” in his home country over allegations of corruption — was paying Mr. Walker $180,000 a month through Robinson Walker LLC, and some of those funds were shared with members of the Biden family. The payments abruptly stopped after the elder Mr. Biden left the vice presidency. 

In total, Mr. Walker took in more than $3 million from the Romanian businessman between 2015 and 2017, with more than $1 million going to the Biden family. 

On Tuesday, another Biden family associate, Tony Bobulinski, told the impeachment investigators that the president acted as an “enabler” of his family’s “corruption” and foreign business dealings. “I want to be crystal clear: From my direct personal experience and what I have subsequently come to learn, it is clear to me that Joe Biden was ‘the Brand’ being sold by the Biden family,” he said. 

Both Hunter Biden and James Biden are due to appear for depositions in February, and the chairman of the Oversight Committee, James Comer, says he intends to invite more individuals to come testify before his inquiry.