The Strange Case of Guo Wengui

With the November election now just days away, the Trump campaign’s closing political play—trying to portray Joe Biden as corrupt by releasing reams of damaging information about his son Hunter—is in full swing. Earlier this month, Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon and personal attorney Rudy Giuliani produced a laptop hard drive they claimed belonged to the younger Biden, and have been rolling out embarrassing content purportedly from it ever since. Last week, it was emails meant to show Hunter trading on his family name in foreign business deals. Then, over the weekend, sexually explicit videos and photos—ostensibly from the same hard drive, and seemingly including Hunter and various women—were published as well.

But unlike the first round of allegations, which were published in the New York Post, these videos were not leaked to traditional Trump-friendly media outlets. Instead, they were published online by a company few Americans had ever heard of: GTV Media Group, co-founded this year by Bannon and a Chinese expat billionaire, Guo Wengui.

Astute observers linked Guo to the bombshell story weeks ago, after associated Twitter and YouTube accounts leaked its contents ahead of the New York Post. In late September, almost a full three weeks before the Post released its story, a YouTube channel associated with Guo foreshadowed the upcoming release of the hard disks. Three days later, Himalaya Global (an advocacy group linked to Guo) sent a tweet with a similar message: “Bombshell… 3 hard disk drives of videos and dossier of Hunter Biden’s connections with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have been sent to Nancy Pelosi and DOJ.  Big money and sex scandal!”. A few days before the New York Post story dropped, a Twitter account shared a picture of Guo and Rudy Giuliani smoking cigars together. 

Formerly one of China’s richest businessmen, Guo fled the country in 2014 in anticipation of charges of corruption, fraud, blackmail, and bribery—charges he insists are trumped-up and political. Since then, he has marketed himself to Western audiences and politicians as an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party and whistleblower on the practices of its officials. But his activities in the United States raise red flags about the authenticity of his self-assigned dissident status. First, Guo—who also goes by several other names, including Miles Guo and Miles Kwok—is currently under investigation for charges of rape, defamation, and fraud in the United States. Another oddity: Guo regularly attacks Chinese human rights activists online, levelling conspiratorial accusations against some of the CCP’s most prominent critics.

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  • Kudos to Charlotte Lawson! This is great work and a VERY underreported story... Thank you for the hard work!!!

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  • Wow. If a poor kid steals a car he'll go to jail. A rich foreign business man defrauds people for millions and interferes in our elections walks around free and living the high life. Only in America.

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  • I think it is such ridiculous premise that somehow Hunter Biden's old computer with a fried hard drive mysteriously ends up in Giuliani's hands, hard drive intact. I mean, come guys, you can do better than that. That's isn't even worthy of the Scooby-Doo Doo gang cartoon.

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  • All of this laptop stuff that the media is ignoring right, will become really big once the left decides that Uncle Joe needs to be replaced by a more progressive Aunt Kamala. And when Harris is president, what do you expect the Republican Party to become? Going back to complaining about a flat tax? Uggh ild rather have Steve Bannon.

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    1. Trump is only 3 years younger than Biden, and Biden seems to be in much better shape. Biden isn't morbidly obese, for one. He's much more intelligent than Trump. He's more lucid and articulate than Trump. Trump is dangerously impulsive and lacks true rational agency when he suffers a narcissistic injury (Trump is mentally disabled, google malignant NPD). Trump gets along so well with brutal dictators because they know exactly what his mental disability is, and how to manipulate him.

      Granted, both Biden and Trump are both at the age where anything can happen - but Biden stands the best chance at going the duration and being his own man.

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      1. The life expectancy for a male who is 78 years old is 9.43 years. Something to note is that the Cold War Presidency onwards was and is the most stressful job in the world.

        Truman: Lived to be 88
        Eisenhower: Lived to be 78 despite a massive heart attack in office
        JFK: Assassinated. Would have likely died young regardless due to Addison's
        LBJ: 64 - major smoker and quite unhealthy before the presidency
        Nixon: 81
        Ford: 93
        Carter: 96 and still going
        Reagan: 93
        H.W. Bush: 94
        Clinton: 74 and still going
        Bush 43: 74 and still going
        Obama: 59 and still going

        Candidates:
        Trump: 74 and definitely still going
        Biden: 78

        The presidency is extremely stressful, but it's also supported by world's best medical care to offset it. Biden probably wouldn't run for a 2nd term if elected, but the life expectancy charts would still be in his favor, with him having 7.3 years left.

        Even everyone's favorite 9/11 nightmare scenario of Strom Thurmond (senator pro tem and 3rd in line) at 99 would have had 2 more years left by life expectancy.

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    2. That's just your paranoid fantasy. Calm down. Ask your physician for Xanax.

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      1. There is absolutely no way that he makes it past the midterms much less than a whole term. This is all tee-d up for Kamala. 2+4+4=10 wonderful years of Kamala as president.

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        1. See my post above. He's not even close to old enough to be within the life expectancy of a single term. In fact, he's old enough now to expect to make it through two, actuarily.

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        2. That assumes that she'd have to win two more elections, no?
          Surely, the GOP will have something better to offer by 2024. If it doesn't, then who's to blame for your scenario?

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          1. The amount of lying done about this poor man and his supporters. Russia a total hoax. Misquoting him on Charlottesville. Calling him a racist. Kavanaugh. Covington. The naked blackmail of the American people going on right now as per covid (we will reevaluate sending kids back to school until after the election), the violent take over of our cities with riots the media does not report. This is a revolution. Chairman Kamala doesn't need to worry about reelection.

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        3. If he didn’t make it past the midterms, then she wouldn’t be able to run for two more terms.

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  • I consider anything Steve Bannon has his hands on as the political equivalent of a smallpox blanket or a chunk of Chernobyl's Elephant's foot.

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  • Here's something that's been bugging me. The FBI's supposedly had the laptop since last fall. Wasn't there a bunch of stuff about Hunter Biden that was used as evidence in the House impeachment proceedings to support Trump's actions? Why wasn't the laptop's info used then?

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  • This was good information - I would really like to see Rudy Giuliani's full phone contacts list.
    Also putting two and two together for me about that poor pastor in Midland tells me everything I need to know about Mr. Guo.

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  • The whole "he claims to be a dissident but is he secretly working for the CCP?" bit sounds like the kind of conspiracy theory you'd hear from people like Alex Jones. And it's just as worthless. When there's no way to know who people like Guo are really working for, it's better to just look at what the motives are here and what foreign interests expect to gain. China (and Russia) benefits from sowing dissension in our politics. They don't want to attack just one side or the other. They want to attack the faith we have in our system. They're going to push any narrative that weakens one side or the other with the intent of making everything weaker. It doesn't matter to them whether the narrative is false or true, so knowing they're involved doesn't speak to the truth or falsehood of the allegations. All this tells us is what we already know: that other countries do not have our best interests at heart.

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    1. By contrast, I don't think there is any doubt as to the motives of Bannon and Giuliani.

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  • This reminds me of when the FBI said that the hard drive story did not appear to be consistent with a Russian disinformation campaign. But when asked for what is instead going on, they clammed up. I wouldn't be surprised if it's instead Chinese, but they don't want to say quite yet lest it compromises the investigation.

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    1. Alternatively, it might also be due to their reluctance to say anything that might further endanger the job of the current FBI director. Much safer just to wait a few weeks.

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      1. Heh the last election had a little thing about that.

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    2. There are a few reports saying that Biden related (dis)information items have been circulating around Ukraine black markets. Emails and pictures, etc. This has been spurred on by Giuliani's intense interest in such information for the past couple years, and shady folks looking for a pay day. If that's where the info came from, chances are decent Russia had some hand in it.

      That's where I'd place my best right now. It could be that Bannon or his Chinese buddy bought some of this (dis)info on the black market and laundered it through the repair shop for Giuliani to find, but who knows.

      From what I've read from the various disinformation researches I follow, China hasn't been taking that kind of direct interference in elections, and their online influence campaigns aren't so sophisticated (yet).

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    3. Let us hope that is the case. However, given Comey and McCabe's running of the FBI with the aid of some other agent's in the "Roohsin" "investigation" I believe it prudent to view this situation of the "Hunter Hard Drive" with a Gimlet Eye.

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    4. I know very little of the disinformation tactics of our foreign adversaries, but I was under the impression that China's interest lie in: curating positive propaganda relating to the CCP, stealing trade secrets for economic/capital dominance, and campaign/government espionage to stay alert regarding any/all US policy changes.

      The Bob Fu smear campaign seems classic China... but I do not expect China to play such a forceful hand in election rigging.

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      1. China has been uncharacteristically forceful since Xi took power too though. Look at their strong-arming everything re: South China Sea, Uyghur concentration camps, overt extortion via Belt and Road, etc.

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    5. Respect. Very insightful comment.

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    6. I was wondering the same thing...

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