Hunter Biden’s firm helped China gain control of essential electric-car battery component

Hunter Biden’s investment firm helped broker a 2016 deal that gave a Chinese state-backed company control of a massive African mine rich in cobalt — a mineral essential for the production of electric car batteries.

The deal would be boosted by President Biden’s $2 trillion social spending plan, which earmarks billions of dollars to promote electric vehicles.

In 2016, an investment firm founded by Hunter Biden with several Chinese partners was cut into a complex $3.8 billion transaction that transferred 80 percent of Congo’s Tenke Fungurum mine from an American company to Beijing-backed China Molybdenum.

Joe Biden was vice president when the deal was struck.

The mine is one of the world’s largest sources of cobalt — and China’s control of the mineral “presents a critical vulnerability to the future of the U.S. domestic auto industry,” Biden’s White House reported in June.- READ MORE