In the Hunter Biden case, a shadowy Israeli witness faces a crucial dilemma
Hunter Biden departs the courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware, on July 26, 2023. Photo by Getty Images
This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.
For months now, dual Israeli-American citizen Gal Luft has been touting himself as a whistleblower against alleged corruption by Hunter Biden, the son of the U.S. president. Luft, a former lieutenant colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, says the Biden administration is targeting him for providing evidence that incriminates Hunter, triggering the November 2022 indictment against Luft.
The U.S. Justice Department says the Haifa-born think-tank director broke the law by not registering as an agent of the Chinese government. He also acted as “a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil; and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement,” the U.S. authorities say.
But according to conversations that Luft had in 2020 whose content was reviewed by TheMarker – the business section of Haaretz – Luft was not happy about the Trump administration’s pressure he claimed he faced that year to provide information implicating Hunter before the November elections.
It emerges from these conversations that in early 2020, when Luft left Israel on a visit to Turkey, he wasn’t only there to secure masks for Israel and Italy during the coronavirus crisis, a trip that has been previously reported. And he didn’t return to Israel – because he feared he would be handed over to the U.S. authorities.
According to Luft’s comments in the conversations, the Turkish government granted him protection, and he maintained contact with a very close associate of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to Luft, sources in the presidential palace told him about recurring pressure from Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, to meet with Luft to gain information implicating Hunter Biden.
It emerges from the conversations that the decision about whether to set up a meeting wasn’t up to Luft but to his Turkish hosts. And he was glad to hear that O’Brien wouldn’t be coming.
TheMarker’s sources declined to be named or allow the publishing of direct quotes from them or Luft.
Luft, meanwhile, has been in an undisclosed hiding place for six months. According to his lawyer, Mordechai Tzivin, Luft’s “actions are unblemished,” and Luft “has a full arsenal of evidence” exculpating him.
Hired to promote Chinese national interests
Luft, 57, is a veteran of the Israeli army’s Artillery Corps. After he left the military around two decades ago, he obtained advanced degrees from Johns Hopkins University in international economics, strategic studies and Middle East studies.
About 15 years ago, Luft and Anne Korin founded the Maryland-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. Luft became a sought-after speaker at conferences on energy, infrastructure and national security.
According to the U.S. indictment, Luft was hired to promote Chinese national interests through an entity linked to the Chinese energy company CEFC, which he formally served as a consultant. Luft was compensated in the form of donations to the research institute by CEFC.
As Haaretz and TheMarker reported in July, Luft promoted meetings between senior members of the Chinese Communist Party and Israeli officials, both at conferences and in meetings that he arranged in Israel.
Luft would call himself “the most connected Israeli in China,” one of his Israeli acquaintances says. In his academic capacity, he would promote China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, whose loans have been criticized as an attempt to subjugate resource-poor countries to Chinese interests. According to the indictment, Luft also promoted arms deals for Chinese companies in Libya, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar without the appropriate licenses.
Little of this would have interested the average American or Israeli if the company that Luft advised hadn’t allegedly paid money to Hunter Biden, and, according to Luft, to the president’s brother James.
Earlier this month, David Weiss, the U.S. special counsel investigating the president’s son, indicted him on suspicion of making false statements in purchasing a gun and illegally obtaining a gun while addicted to drugs. Weiss might also charge Hunter Biden for failing to submit his income tax returns on time.
It is not disputed that firms in which Hunter Biden played a role received millions of dollars from companies, including in Ukraine and China, for opening doors in Washington when his father was vice president, and even during the Trump presidency.
So far no evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s business affairs has been uncovered, unlike the son’s use of the father’s position to impress clients. In a confidential hearing of the House Oversight Committee whose contents were made public in late July, Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden, testified that Hunter routinely spoke to his father in front of clients with the phone on speakerphone. According to Archer, the two did not discuss business matters but rather topics such as the weather or fishing.
The Republicans hope that evidence linking President Biden to assistance for his son’s business affairs will be uncovered before the November 2024 elections, and if possible, for the impeachment trial they hope to launch in the coming months. The comments by Luft and his lawyer form part of the basis for those hopes.
Pressure from the White House
Luft has become a hero on the populist right in the United States, especially after The New York Post released a video in July where Luft says his indictment is designed to silence him as a witness in the Hunter Biden investigation.
Though filed in November 2022, the indictment was published during the week the video was released. “No one should be surprised here. I don’t trust the DOJ or the FBI. They are trying to silence our witnesses,” Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, told Fox Business in July.
In the video, Luft claimed he revealed incriminating information against members of the Biden family in a meeting with members of the Justice Department and the FBI in Brussels in March 2019. He calls this the mistake of his life.
In the indictment, Luft is accused of making false statements at this meeting when he denied that he promoted deals with an Iranian energy company. This contributed to an additional indictment of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran.
In Luft’s 2020 conversations whose content was reviewed by TheMarker, Luft claims that he had daily contact with Ibrahim Kalin, at the time a close adviser and spokesman to Erdogan, and also the deputy head of the president’s Council of Security and Foreign Policy. Since June, Kalin has been Turkey’s intelligence chief. Luft says Kalin briefed him on repeated requests by O’Brien.
According to Luft, around September 2020, O’Brien pleaded to be allowed to come to Turkey to meet with Luft secretly, with the intention of obtaining information on Hunter Biden’s links to CEFC, the Chinese company. Luft believed that O’Brien sought to provide Trump with weapons to attack Joe Biden in the run-up to the elections.
According to Luft, such requests began weeks before the October 2020 leaking of emails showing payments that Hunter received from CEFC. Luft says his Turkish hosts rejected O’Brien’s requests, and he was pleased with this decision.
A public official’s use of a diplomatic channel to achieve a political goal may constitute an abuse of power under U.S. law. This case joins the pressure that Trump applied, including on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a 2019 phone call, when Trump wanted Ukraine to launch an investigation against the Kyiv-based company Burisma, which employed Hunter Biden as a director. The affair was at the center of Trump’s first impeachment trial, which concluded in early 2020 with his acquittal by the Republican majority in the Senate.
According to Luft, another person who asked for permission to visit Turkey was Jared Kushner. Luft said his hosts believed that Trump’s adviser and son-in-law sought to visit because of Luft’s presence in Turkey, though Kushner did not explicitly state this. According to Luft, Kushner’s request for an urgent visit was denied.
O’Brien and Kushner declined to comment, while the Turkish government did not respond to TheMarker’s request for comment.
In Luft’s 2020 conversations whose content was reviewed by TheMarker, Luft said that information regarding his 2019 meeting with the FBI and Justice Department had also reached the Biden family. He said appeals were made to officials at Erdogan’s palace by a lawyer who, Luft said, represented Hunter Biden.
The lawyer was allegedly aware of the pressure from the White House and threatened legal action if Luft did not remain silent. The lawyer’s name was not mentioned in the conversations. Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, did not respond to the TheMarker’s questions on the matter.
Arrest in Cyprus
Luft’s 2020 conversations whose content was reviewed by TheMarker give no indication of Luft’s response to Biden’s election victory, but his actions may indicate he felt relieved.
Only after the vote did Luft leave Turkey and return to Israel, where his family lives, after many months away. Between 2021 and his disappearance six months ago, Luft divided his time between Turkey, China and Israel, presenting himself as a researcher at Ostim Technical University in Ankara.
Luft, however, was arrested in February during a visit to Cyprus, on the back of a U.S. extradition request because of the indictment filed in November.
After being detained in Cyprus for several days, Luft was released on bail but was forbidden to leave the country. In March, awaiting his extradition hearing in the southern city of Larnaca, he fled Cyprus and his whereabouts remain unknown.
Tzivin, Luft’s lawyer, has visited Turkey at least six times since his client’s disappearance, but Tzivin says these trips were not for meetings with Luft, whose whereabouts he declined to comment on.
In his statement, Tzivin reiterated a comment he gave to Haaretz and TheMarker in July. He said that Luft “has been persecuted by the U.S. law enforcement authorities due to political interests. The U.S. authorities are afraid of the information he possesses, which could undermine President Biden’s political standing.
According to Tzivin, “It’s enough if we mention an email in which Hunter writes to the Chinese oil company that he is sitting and waiting with his father for a phone call. And surprise, surprise: A few days after the email, $5.1 million was transferred to a bank account connected to the Biden family.”
For this article, Tzivin added: “Luft was asked only once by a licensed arms dealer to check prices for certain transactions. Therefore, the suspicion that he sold illegal weapons is completely unfounded, and there is no basis for it.
“All other matters mentioned in the article are part of a web of lies intended to undermine Luft’s credibility as a witness against the U.S. president. Mr. Luft has decided not to go to the United States because he believes he will not receive a fair trial there. Any reasonable person in his situation would make the same decision.”
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