The members of the China Entrepreneur Club, who got a tour of the White House and a meeting with Vice President Joe Biden in 2011 thanks to the intervention of Hunter Biden’s business buddies, got some good news in September.
The man who hosted them at the White House, Jeffrey Zients, will help run Joe Biden’s transition team.
Upshot: If Biden takes the oath of office on January 20, a group known as China’s “second foreign ministry” can plug right in to the Oval Office through Zients, a high-flying Wall Street Deep Stater.
The Meeting
As The New American reported last week, the CEC arranged a White House tour through a cutout who contacted Hunter Biden’s business associates.
Writing for Breitbart, Peter Schweizer and Seamus Bruner exposed the meeting with the help of Hunter Biden associate Bevan Cooney, who gave the pair access to his Gmail account.
The cutout, Mohamed Khashoggi, asked another Biden biz croney, Gary Fears, to set up the tour for CEC, the membership of which includes top Chinese Reds. Khashoggi wanted a “senior official” to escort the group. Helping arrange the tour, Khashoggi assured Fears, would mean future profitable deals.
Reported Schweizer and Bruner, “The Obama-Biden Administration archives reveal that this Chinese delegation did indeed visit the White House on November 14, 2011, and enjoyed high-level access. The delegation included approximately thirty members, according to White House visitor logs.”
That’s where Zients comes in:
The visitor logs list Jeff Zients, the deputy director of Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as the host of the CEC delegation. Obama had tasked Zients with restructuring and ultimately consolidating the various export-import agencies under the Commerce Department — an effort in which the Chinese delegation would have a keen interest.
Even better, the Chinese met with Vice President Joe Biden.
The visitor logs don’t reveal such a meeting, but a top CEC member did. “In an obscure document listing the CEC members’ biographies, CEC Secretary General Maggie Cheng alleges that she facilitated the CEC delegation meetings in Washington in 2011 and boasts of the Washington establishment figures that CEC met with,” Schweizer and Bruner reported. “The first name she dropped was that of Vice President Joe Biden.”
Schweizer and Bruner don’t say Zients actually arranged the meeting.
Transition Co-chair
Zients is a Wall Street financier typical of the breed. The CEO of Cranemere Group, a capital investment firm based in London, he moves easily between boardrooms of Big Business and backrooms of Big Government.
“Prior to Cranemere, Jeff served as the Director of President Obama’s National Economic Council,” his biography at Cranemere’s website says. “Jeff previously served as the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget and also was responsible for the technology turnaround of healthcare.gov.”
Before serving in Government, Jeff served as the Chairman, CEO, and COO of the Advisory Board Company and Chairman of the Corporate Executive Board. During his tenure, these companies created more than $2 billion in equity value for shareholders.
Of course, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His name does not appear on the most recent membership list of the Trilateral Commission.
And so early last month, Biden picked him to co-chair the White House transition team. Progressives were miffed.
Biden’s people announced the move on the Saturday before Labor Day, and “before the weekend was over, Jeff Hauser, who runs the progressive Revolving Door Project, was working the phone to get him removed,” Bloomberg reported:
Zients is among a small group of Democrats who made a fortune at the intersection of the investment industry and corporate America, gained power in the White House and can easily weave in and out of those worlds. A former top economic adviser to Barack Obama, he hosted a Biden fundraiser in November. He served on Facebook Inc.’s board until this year, and now he’s on leave as head of the Cranemere Group, a holding company that buys businesses.
That kind of career is the envy of influence-seeking Wall Streeters, and enough to draw the attention of the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank in Washington. The group says it scrutinizes executive branch appointees to ensure they serve the public interest. The project, along with David Segal of the progressive group Demand Progress, doesn’t want someone with Zients’s deep corporate ties shaping the next government.
“Biden needs to hear from fewer wannabe Warren Buffetts, and more people with their finger on the pulse of middle America,” Hauser said. “We’re going to make an argument that his mindset is at odds with Biden’s stated goal of an FDR-style administration. We’re going to make this case publicly, and put it before voters and activists and leaders of progressive organizations.”
Zients is known as a “staunch capitalist,” Politico reported, which raised the hackles of another “progressive.”
“There are several concerning figures named here,” David Segal of Demand Progress told the webzine. “In general, and moreover in a populist moment, there’s no legitimate reason for Biden to elevate somebody as entrenched in the finance industry as Zients.”
Question is, what role will Zients play in a Biden administration? Secretary of treasury? Chairman of the Federal Reserve?
Whatever the answer, if Zients takes a top job with Biden, China will have a man they can trust inside the administration.
Then again, the Biden boys will be right there too if Zients returns to the private sector.
H/T: Breitbart
