Shortly before midnight on February 18th this year, a curious post appeared on the Twitter feed of a former Israeli military officer and director of a think tank located near Washington.
“I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the US … claiming I’m an arms dealer … I’ve never been an arms dealer.” Gal Luft wrote. He claimed the US Department of Justice was “trying to bury me” to protect President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Several weeks later Luft vanished after jumping bail in Cyprus – but not before he had come to the attention of Republicans in the House of Representatives in Washington who have been investigating the business dealings of members of the Biden family. Luft claims to have damaging information Hunter Biden.
For several years Republicans have been promoting allegations of corruption against the president’s son. More recently they have sought to enmesh Joe Biden into these claims of wrongdoing. These include claims that as vice-president he was involved in a $5 million bribery scheme involving someone in Ukraine.
The allegations of corruption have been loud but without substantive evidence so far being produced. The president has rejected the claims made by Republicans.
The charges made by Luft fed straight into the corruption allegations that were swirling around Washington and ensured that he would become a key figure for the Republicans in the house. But in a bombshell last Monday it was Luft who found himself at the centre of allegations.
Prosecutors in New York unsealed an indictment that had originally been handed down in secret last year which charged him with a number of offences including with arms trafficking, sanctions violations and acting as an unregistered agent for China.
Prosecutors said Luft recruited and paid an unnamed former US government official, who in 2016 was acting as an adviser for the then president-elect Donald Trump, “to publicly support certain policies with respect to China”.
If convicted, Luft could face up to 100 years in prison.
Several days before the indictment was released the New York Post had published details of a video recorded by Luft from an undisclosed location where he was on the run. In the video he maintained he had been arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying to the House oversight committee about payments made to the Biden family from individuals linked to China.
He claimed that his troubles with the justice department began after he shared details with it and the FBI at a meeting in Brussels in 2019 of payments made to Hunter Biden and another Biden family member by a Chinese energy company. He also maintained that the Biden family had a mole in the FBI who was known as “one eye”.
Luft claimed he was “patient zero of the Biden family investigation”.
Republicans in Congress embraced Luft as a whistleblower but acknowledged after he went on the run in Cyprus that their potential key witness had gone missing. The Republican chairman of the House oversight committee, James Comer, had maintained last week that Luft was “a very credible witness on Biden family corruption”.
He said Luft had provided incriminating evidence to six officials from the FBI and the Department of Justice at the meeting in Brussels, but that authorities had not acted on this information.
Comer signalled that despite the unsealing of the indictment against Luft, his committee’s investigation into the Bidens would continue. He said he wanted to obtain FBI records on information provided by Luft.
Other senior Republicans said they did not trust the Department of Justice.
However in recent days Democrats have hit back. They expressed concern that an official committee of the US House of Representatives had been manipulated by an individual who was a fugitive and who had attempted to fortify his defence by laundering unfounded and potentially false allegations through Congress.
Further hearings involving whistleblowers into the allegations against the Biden family are expected to be convened by Republicans over the coming weeks.
