Chris Meyer, a researcher at Widefountain, dives into the intricate world of CEFC China, exploring its shadowy influence in U.S. politics. He reveals how this energy conglomerate was linked to a $100-million scheme involving the Biden family and highlights the alarming leaks from a senior FBI official. The conversation unveils a deliberate strategy mixing espionage and manipulation designed to fracture political institutions and acquire U.S. military technology. Meyer connects these operations to the historical Chinagate, illustrating a persistent pattern of deception.
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insights INSIGHT
CEFC As A Long-Term Shadowplay
CEFC operated as a long-term, multifaceted espionage operation rather than a one-off business deal.
Chris Meyer calls it a "shadow play" designed to confuse and distract Western institutions while advancing Chinese intelligence goals.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Hunter Biden And The Diamond-Gifted Approach
Ye Jianming personally cultivated Hunter Biden with lavish gifts and promises tied to a Louisiana natural gas deal.
Meyer recounts an $80,000 diamond ring and earnest money offers to illustrate how influence was bought.
insights INSIGHT
Bribes And Kompromat As Dual Weapons
The CEFC approach combined bribery and manufactured kompromat to create leverage and potential political damage.
Meyer argues the structure gave the operator two ways to exploit targets: reward and weaponize exposure.
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Today on The Bureau Podcast: unpacking my reporting on an explosive Justice Department watchdog report that confirmed the worst kind of national security malpractice. A senior FBI counterintelligence official leaked case-critical information from the agency’s multi-year probe into CEFC China — the energy conglomerate that bribed United Nations officials while simultaneously attempting to draw the Biden family into a $100-million natural gas project in Louisiana, through a web of companies tied directly to a close associate of President Xi Jinping.
On this episode I speak with Chris Meyer of Widefountain. Chris has spent years tracing CEFC’s global influence network — the money flows, the murky intermediaries — and he frames the new inspector-general findings as the latest revelation in a Chinese military intelligence operation that Chris calls a “shadowplay”: a deliberate, many-armed campaign that mixes kompromat and targeted interference aimed at dividing and distracting the U.S. government. The brilliance of China’s successful campaign — which succeeded in appropriating U.S. military technology — involves fracturing political institutions and inserting spies into those divisions to make the plunder of sensitive information easier, Chris argues.
We’ll connect senior FBI agent Charles McGonigal’s leaks to the larger criminal tapestry. The CEFC probe in New York and at the United Nations touched figures charged in the Southern District — Patrick Ho and other CEFC executives — and it intersected with allegations of arms brokering, sanctions evasion, and influence peddling that prosecutors later tied to an accused operator now indicted as Gal Luft, the so-called “Target 3” in related filings. Chris ultimately links the CEFC case — in which James Biden was implicated in efforts to determine whether Patrick Ho, central to the CEFC influence play targeting the Bidens, would be arrested if he returned to the United States — to the earlier “Chinagate” scandal, which targeted the Clinton White House, and the GOP’s election fundraising networks during Newt Gingrich’s comeback era.
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