Federal prosecutors on Monday unsealed charges against a think tank leader who claims he has incriminating information about President Joe Biden.
The Justice Department said Gal Luft, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel, engaged in “multiple international criminal schemes,” including arms dealing and acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the People’s Republic of China.
The government said Luft was arrested in Cyprus in February but that he’s now on the run after having been released on bail. In its news release, the Justice Department asked for tips about Luft’s whereabouts.
Luft said in a video published online by the New York Post last week that he gave investigators details about arrangements between the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and a Chinese energy company, and that he was arrested in order to prevent his testimony before the House Oversight Committee.
“Instead of showing appreciation for my whistleblowing, I became public enemy number one,” Luft said in the video.
Hunter Biden’s financial arrangements with CEFC China Energy have been previously reported by journalists as well as by Republicans wielding bank records and subpoenas from Capitol Hill. Luft had allegedly been working with the same organization in 2016 in order to spread Chinese propaganda in the U.S. and to arrange illegal arms sales abroad. The former head of the CEFC was sentenced to three years in prison in 2019 for bribing officials in Chad and Uganda.
Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement that Luft “subverted foreign agent registration laws in the United States to seek to promote Chinese policies by acting through a former high-ranking U.S. 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.”
Luft, the director of a Washington, D.C., think tank called the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, said in his video that the government official Williams referred to is former CIA Director James Woolsey, who served as an adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. All he did, Luft said, was ghostwrite an article with Woolsey’s name on it.
The indictment says that while working on behalf of CEFC, Luft schemed to recruit and “educate” the official so that he would make public statements favorable to China and that the official would be paid $6,000 per month to publish articles in a Chinese newspaper. Luft’s alleged crime was that he failed to register as a foreign agent.
According to emails quoted in the indictment, Luft and an associate hoped Woolsey would get a prominent position within the new administration. Woolsey wound up resigning as a Trump adviser, however, before Trump took office.
House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.), who has been conducting investigations into the Biden family, said earlier this year that one of his sources had gone missing, prompting mockery from Democrats.
After the New York Post made Luft’s video public, Comer said he’d been vindicated.
“He’s very credible, and the people on MSNBC who made fun of me when I said we had an informant that was missing, they should feel like fools right now,” Comer told Newsmax TV last week. “This is their worst nightmare.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Sunday that Luft should be granted immunity to provide information on the Bidens. On Tuesday, after the unsealing of the indictment against Luft, Johnson questioned whether the Justice Department wanted to silence his testimony.
“The bottom line is, this is so unfortunate,” Johnson said. “I can’t trust the Department of Justice.”
Asked if the charges harmed Luft’s credibility as a whistleblower, Johnson said, “I don’t know.”