“I, who volunteered to inform the US government about a potential security breach and about compromising information about a man vying to be the next president, am now being hunted by the very same people who I informed—and may have to live on the run for the rest of my life…”
—Dr. Gal Luft, in a video recorded in an “undisclosed location,” published by the New York Post
“As alleged, Gal Luft, a dual US-Israeli citizen and co-head of a Maryland think tank, engaged in multiple, serious criminal schemes. He subverted foreign agent registration laws in the United States to seek to promote Chinese policies by acting through a former high-ranking US government official; he acted as a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil; and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement.”
—Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a statement about the unsealing of the indictment against Dr. Luft
Is the Biden crime family tormenting a man who tried to report their illicit dealings with the Chinese government? Or is there no “Biden crime family” in any meaningful sense, and the US government is simply trying to arrest a person who was secretly working for China and trying to sell Iranian oil?
These are the competing narratives in the case of Dr. Gal Luft, the Israeli-American head of a thinktank who was arrested in Cyprus in February but then went on the run. Dr. Luft put forth his view of events in a video published by the New York Post two weeks ago. The US government had their own version to present last week when they unsealed the indictment against Luft.
The story has plenty of elements one might expect in a novel about espionage: a man on the run, accusations of dealings with shadowy foreign officials, accusations of huge sums of money being transferred, videos sent from “undisclosed locations,” and so forth. Unlike a novel, however, this story has two narratives with no resolution as to which is true, and a very real person claiming that he will need to be on the run for the rest of his life.
The escape
The most dramatic part of the story happened in Cyprus. In February, Luft was arrested and told by a Cypriot court to put up hundreds of thousands of euros in bail and to remain under house arrest while extradition procedures went forward. Luft was also required to report regularly at a police station to show that he was still observing the terms of his bail.
But on March 28, Luft failed to appear for his appointment at the police station, and his lawyer said that he was afraid something had happened to him. His car was found a short time later, seemingly abandoned.
It soon became clear that he had fled. Luft has subsequently said that he believed that he was the victim of a political hit job and that he would never get a fair shake in the American court system because of the machinations of the forces arrayed against him. His current whereabouts are unknown, though some have speculated that he is in Israel while others have claimed that he is in Turkey.
The thinktank expert
Thinktanks don’t have a reputation for excitement. They’re often thought of as places where experts go to state their opinions when they don’t have a “real” job. But Dr. Luft’s thinktank, the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, appears to have been influential enough that the Chinese government wanted him to serve as a consultant—alongside Hunter Biden.
Luft’s thinktank focuses on global energy issues, and for four years, he advised the Chinese company CEFC China Energy. CNN has described that company as having “aligned itself so closely with the Chinese government that it was often hard to distinguish between the two.” Specifically, he was advising the NGO branch of CEFC, called the China Energy Fund Committee, which was based in Hong Kong and Virginia.
That organization was headed by Patrick Ho, the former secretary for home affairs of Hong Kong, who was sentenced by a federal court in 2019 to three years in prison for international money laundering and bribery offenses.
Both Luft’s claims of whistleblowing against Biden and the crimes the feds are alleging Luft committed are related to Ho.
Luft’s story
Dr. Luft says that the reason for his troubles is that he tried to tell the Justice Department about Hunter Biden’s (and maybe other Biden family members’) illicit dealings with the Chinese.
He claims that in March of 2019, he met for two days in the US Embassy in Brussels, Belgium, with two prosecutors from the Southern District of New York and six FBI agents, and he told them that Hunter Biden had received massive payments from Chinese figures with ties to military intelligence. Luft said that he had contacted them and was doing a public service, because it was commonly rumored that Joe Biden would be running for president.
He also said that he warned them that Hunter Biden had a mole inside the FBI, a man missing an eye, who would leak classified information to the Chinese connection.
Luft has not been clear, in his public comments, whether he has information that directly connects Joe Biden to any money paid by the Chinese, a question that has come up in regard to other allegations of payments made to Hunter Biden. Luft has pointed to a text message given to Congress by IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley in which Hunter Biden apparently tells a translator at CEFC, “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.” Hunter Biden goes on to threaten the company, again invoking his father.
Joe Biden has denied that he was present when Hunter texted that.
In communications through his lawyer, Luft has said that his story is mostly about the FBI “putting its finger on the scale” to elect Joe Biden, not about Biden’s wrongdoing. That’s because his story mostly takes place during the Trump administration, and in essence he is saying that the Trump Justice Department failed to investigate the allegations that he had presented to them in the run-up to the 2020 election.
The government’s story
In a 58-page indictment, the Department of Justice argues that Dr. Luft used the Chinese connections that he had through his thinktank to promote Chinese interests as an unregistered foreign agent, to broker arms sales, and to arrange for the sale of Iranian oil. They back up these allegations with a big batch of email conversations between Luft and various parties, and they say that Luft was paid $350,000 to represent the Chinese. All of this allegedly took place from 2015 through 2017.
For the Chinese, the documents say, Luft helped maintain a relationship between them and former CIA Director James Woolsey, seemingly with an eye to have influence on him if he would become an adviser to President Trump. Luft allegedly had Woolsey write op-eds and give talks and interviews that were favorable for the Chinese. Woolsey had been a co-founder of Luft’s thinktank, and he seemed to still have sway over him. Luft wrote emails in which he said that he would have to ghostwrite some of Woolsey’s op-eds. Payments began being transferred from the thinktank to Woolsey.
But Luft also told his Chinese contact in an email that Woolsey—whom he described as “our friend”—was on a shortlist of candidates for positions in the Trump administration, including secretary of defense, secretary of homeland security, and director of national intelligence. The Chinese official responded that they would like to see Woolsey in a position that had relevance to China, so secretary of defense would be best and director of national intelligence would be next best.
When Woolsey emailed Luft a draft of an email he planned to send to a Trump transition official, offering his services, Luft added language to it noting that Woolsey had China experience, which Woolsey ended up sending to the Trump official.
The indictment also alleges that Luft acted as a broker on attempted deals to sell Chinese weapons to Libya, the United Arab Emirates and Kenya, in violation of the Arms Export Control Act, which limits the ability of US citizens to broker arms deals. In emails with his Chinese contacts—an executive at CEFC and an executive who represented a Chinese defense company—Luft referred to the weapons as “toys,” according to the indictment, although they occasionally slipped up and referred to rockets and other weapons by name. The emails clearly indicated that they knew that they were trying to hide the transactions.
Furthermore, the indictment states that over a period of months from 2015 through 2016, Luft tried to broker deals involving Iranian oil, including through CEFC and other entities. These deals are also discussed and detailed in a number of emails.
Intriguingly, the indictment also includes counts of lying to investigators—and they involve that same meeting in Brussels. The indictment says that Luft lied to the investigators whom he met in Brussels, both about whether he had brokered arms deal and whether he had brokered oil sales to Iran.
Refutations and arguments
In general, Luft has said that the charges against him are an attempt to keep him from testifying about Hunter Biden. In the video given to the New York Post, he dared the DOJ to release the indictment openly, but there was very little time spent refuting the exact allegations within the indictment—which they unsealed just days after his video was published.
In a subsequent communication with Luft, through his attorney, he said, “The emails in the indictment were taken out of context to build a fictional narrative. Worse, emails that opposed their narrative were conveniently omitted.”
It does not appear that he disputes the veracity of the emails that were quoted.
Luft has also said that the DOJ knows how weak their case is and that is why they tried to have him arrested when he was in Cyprus on a trip rather than when he was in Israel. Do they not believe that Israel’s courts would extradite him? he asked in the New York Post video.
(The fact that Israel has famously often dragged its feet, sometimes for years, in dealing with extraditions may also be an explanation, however. Mordechai Tzivin, one of Dr. Luft’s lawyers, told Ami: “The fact that the US requested his extradition from Cyprus and not from Israel, in my opinion, stems from the extradition agreement between the US and Israel, according to which the extradition of an Israeli citizen is subject to his return to Israel immediately after the end of the US legal proceedings in order to serve the sentence in Israel, to the extent that a sentence has been imposed on him. The Americans prefer that he serves his sentence in the US and thus prevent the dissemination of the information in his possession.”)
One problem with Dr. Luft’s assertion that he had been worried about the Bidens’ financial arrangements with the Chinese is that he gave an interview to Fox News, published in November of 2019, in which he downplayed security concerns about some of Hunter Biden’s Chinese connections and also suggested that Hunter Biden’s connections with a Chinese company were a standard business practice.
“The job of those high-profile individuals is mostly to lend credibility and prestige to the company and to utilize their connections,” Luft said to Fox News. “Corporate America invented this practice, and now China mimics it.”
If he was concerned about Biden’s behavior in March of 2019, why was he treating it as par for the course eight months later?
What makes someone a foreign agent?
One interesting argument that Dr. Luft has made is that if he is being prosecuted for failing to register as a foreign agent because of his work for the Chinese company, why isn’t Hunter Biden also being prosecuted for the same act?
That, indeed, is a question that has been discussed for some time, and it is not yet clear whether it has been settled. Is the DOJ still investigating Hunter Biden on such charges?
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires that anyone who acts as “agent of a foreign principal” and does one of four things must register. Those four things are: 1) engaging within the United States in political activities, such as trying to convince US officials or citizens about public policy; 2) acting within the United States as a public relations counsel, publicity agent, information service employee, or political consultant; 3) soliciting or distributing money; or 4) representing the foreign interests in front of US government officials or agencies.
If the DOJ hasn’t been able to prove that Hunter Biden was acting inside the US on behalf of CEFC, rather than just advising them outside the US, that may be holding them back from prosecuting him. Usually prosecutions under FARA also require that the person realize that there is a requirement to register, but there are emails from both Hunter Biden and Dr. Luft in which they mention FARA and the requirement to register, so that wouldn’t be a defense.
Then there’s the possibility that the reason that Hunter Biden hasn’t been prosecuted yet is for the one that Dr. Luft has been arguing. The political powers-that-be are directing that Biden be spared and that Luft be silenced. ●
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