The National Archives and Records Administration has released photos of then-Vice President Joe Biden meeting his son Hunter’s Chinese clients as part of a protracted records request fight.
The images are the first photographic evidence of the president meeting the executives from BHR Partners, a Chinese-based private equity firm that Hunter Biden and two other American partners founded and once had a 30% stake in.
In the photos, Joe Biden is depicted meeting BHR Partners CEO Jonathan Li and two other top executives from the company in December 2013, around the same time Hunter Biden was launching the firm. Another photo shows Joe Biden introducing his son to Chinese President Xi Jinping during the same trip.
Both meetings were previously uncovered through written evidence, including congressional testimony and emails. The newly released photos of them, however, underscore how Joe Biden misled the public by initially asserting that he never interacted with his son’s business partners and kept an “absolute wall” between him and them.
The release of the photos came in response to conservative group America First Legal’s expansive Freedom of Information Act requests.
AFL first sued NARA in 2022 to expedite the release of the records, but NARA argued it had limitations on the pace at which it could process the high volume of requests. NARA eventually released the photos in October 2024 as part of a dump of more than 100 images, but a 30-day extension invoked by the White House counsel led to them becoming public after the 2024 election, according to NARA.
Hunter Biden and other witnesses confirmed the meetings depicted in the photos in congressional testimony this year and in emails obtained by the House Oversight Committee. The first son characterized the encounter with Li as brief and insignificant.
“When we returned from an event to the hotel, there was a rope line, and Jonathan Li was in the lobby of the hotel where I was going to meet him for coffee,” Hunter Biden testified. “In that line, I introduced my dad to Jonathan Li and a friend of his, and they shook hands and I believe probably took a photograph. And then my father went up to his room, and I went to have coffee with Jonathan Li.”
Hunter Biden relinquished his share of BHR Partners in 2021, but not before the firm secured a successful cobalt investment in a Chinese company that is, according to the New York Times, now the world’s largest electric vehicle battery maker.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote Friday on X that the lack of media coverage of the photos was why the “public is abandoning legacy media for new media.”
The photos add to “an already ample photographic and testimonial record contradicting the President’s past denials” about his son’s business ventures, Turley said.
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America First Legal counsel Michael Ding said the photos were evidence of Hunter Biden using his father’s political influence for personal profit.
“Even while President Biden has pardoned his son, Hunter, for anything and everything ‘he has committed or may have committed or taken part in’ going all the way back to the year 2014, more evidence comes out each day showing how his family leveraged Joe Biden’s even longer career in public office for private gain,” Ding said. “America First Legal will not stop fighting to uncover the full story of the Biden Family’s corruption.”
