Hunter Biden’s hotshot attorney was also scrutinized by DoJ

Hunter Biden‘s top criminal defense lawyer was himself scrutinized by the Justice Department after he allegedly represented a suspected Chinese spy, court documents reveal.

Abbe Lowell, Hunter’s hotshot attorney, has allegedly represented three Chinese ‘agents’ and was questioned by prosecutors over potential conflicts of interest for these former legal representations.

Lowell is currently battling investigations by the FBI and the House Oversight Committee into the First Son’s shady dealings with CEFC, a Chinese oil giant with corrupt executives and close links to the nation’s Communist Party.

Court records and interviews reveal Lowell, 70, has a prolific history of representing and dealing with Chinese government-backed crooks and alleged spies which raised conflict of interest concerns among prosecutors he faced in past cases.

His dealings with foreign agents seeking to influence US officials led to the head of the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) unit sending a notice to Lowell as early as 2019, DoJ documents obtained by DailyMail.com reveal.

Senior Justice officials even drafted a waiver for one of his clients they were prosecuting, stating that Lowell ‘may have potential civil and/or criminal exposure,’ which Lowell claimed was inaccurate, and warned of ‘potential conflicts of interest with Mr. Lowell’.

The FARA generally requires anyone lobbying US officials on behalf of a ‘foreign agent’ or power to register with the DoJ.

Most recently Lowell represented Nickie Lum Davis, a Hawaiian businesswoman sentenced in January to two years in prison for secretly lobbying for China in an illicit multi-million-dollar scheme.

Davis, 47, admitted to attempts to influence top DoJ officials and even then-President Trump, including to allow Beijing to extradite Chinese dissident Guo Wengui.

Lowell also allegedly represented Ng Lap Seng, a billionaire Macau casino tycoon who was a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, convicted in 2017 of bribing the United Nations General Assembly President John Ashe with $500,000.

Ng’s close links to the Chinese government were known as early as 1998, when a Senate report identified him as the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars illegally channeled to the Democratic National Convention under the Clinton Administration.

Ng set up an NGO, South-South News, that got official status at the UN, and in August 2013 began funneling $20,000 per month to Ashe in exchange for his support of a UN-sponsored conference center in Macau that Ng’s company would develop.

While Ng was under house arrest in September 2017, a US court granted his request to meet with Lowell ‘with a view to possibly formally retaining him.’

During negotiations with prosecutors in the Davis case in August 2019, it emerged that Davis knew Ng. Lowell was told that his previous legal involvement with the casino tycoon could cause a ‘conflict of interest’ which ‘could lead to issues surrounding any potential judicial outcome for Lum Davis’, according to FBI documents seen by DailyMail.com.

The documents – a write-up of a call between Lowell, FBI agents and prosecutors – say the attorney told federal law enforcement there was no conflict.

Lowell also allegedly represented Chinese national Qin Fei, who was reportedly suspected by US authorities of being a Chinese spy, and was wiretapped under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) .

US officials believed that Qin was Ng’s handler, and was an intelligence officer with the Ministry of State Security, China’s main foreign intelligence agency, a former intelligence official told Yahoo News.

Qin, who lives in China, was never charged and remains a shadowy figure. He bought a mansion on Long Island in 2014 according to real estate records, but by 2016 neighbors still hadn’t seen him, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Speaking to Yahoo News in 2018, Ng’s attorney Hugh Mo denied his client had any connection with Chinese spooks, but did claim that Qin was being wiretapped.

The FBI documents seen by DailyMail.com say that Lowell told prosecutors he represented Qin ‘years’ before the Davis case, and that it was also not a conflict of interest – but the documents also suggested that his representation of Qin was around the time of the UN bribery investigation in 2015.

Lowell assured law enforcement that he had ‘no obligation to tell Ng or Qin what Lum Davis is reporting to the Government’ in her plea deal.

The Chinese names were redacted when the FBI documents were publicly filed in Davis’ criminal case, but Ng and Qin were identifiable based on unredacted information in the documents, and a source familiar with the investigation confirmed their identity to DailyMail.com.

Exhibits from the Davis court case also include Justice Department emails revealing the investigation into Lowell by the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the DoJ’s National Security Division.

On April 6, 2020, FARA unit chief Brandon Van Grack wrote to Lowell about a ‘possible obligation to register pursuant to the Foreign Agents Registration Act’.

‘We are seeking information to help us determine whether you have an obligation to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act […] by virtue of your activities directed towards agencies and officials of the Government of the United States, on behalf of [redacted], all of whom are foreign principals under the Act,’ the largely blacked-out letter said.

‘FARA requires the registration of certain ‘agents of foreign principals’ engaged in political activities or other activities specified under the Act.’

Four months later on August 25, 2020, Justice official John Keller, chief of the Public Integrity Section, drafted a waiver for Davis to sign acknowledging the probe into Lowell and potential conflicts of interest over his alleged previous representation of Qin and Ng.

‘The defendant understands that one of her attorneys, Abbe D. Lowell, has previously represented other individuals against whom Ms. Lum Davis may potentially cooperate,’ the waiver said.

‘Ms. Lum Davis also understands that Mr. Lowell has been notified by the United States Department of Justice that he may have potential civil and/or criminal exposure for conduct unrelated to this matter.’

Lowell angrily shot back that the ‘letter did not say I have potential civil or criminal exposure or anything close’, and the waiver was revised a few days later to remove the ‘exposure’ reference.

Now Lowell is representing Hunter, who received millions of dollars from CEFC executives convicted of a similar UN bribery scheme to Ng’s, bank statements obtained by DailyMail.com show.

CEFC’s secretary general Patrick Ho – who Hunter described in a recorded conversation on his abandoned laptop as the ‘f***ing spy chief of China’ – was convicted in 2019 of bribing Ashe with $50,000 and Ashe’s successor Sam Kutesa with half a million dollars.

Ho hired Hunter for $1 million to represent him as his lawyer in September 2017, two months before his arrest at JFK Airport.

Ho also oversaw an energy deal between Hunter’s company and CEFC which resulted in over $5 million wired to members of the Biden family. The deal is currently under investigation by the House Oversight Committee, and reportedly in a criminal probe by a federal prosecutor in Delaware, according to the New York Times and other publications.

CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming fled the US in 2017 before he could be arrested, after allegedly receiving a tipoff about the FBI investigation into his company.

Former CEFC advisor Dr. Gal Luft, an Israeli energy expert, has made sensational claims to the Oversight Committee that Hunter had a senior former or current FBI official nicknamed ‘One-Eye’ feeding information on the Bureau’s probe to Ye.

Hunter told the New Yorker in 2019 that Ye had expressed concerns that his right hand man Ho was under federal investigation as early as summer of 2017.

Lowell’s alleged former client Qin also avoided an entanglement with US authorities after he was tipped off by an Air China staffer and fled America back to his homeland in October 2015.

The former Air China employee, Ying Lin, pleaded guilty in April 2019 to smuggling packages on flights for Chinese military personnel. A DoJ sentencing memo says Lin alerted Qin to the government’s espionage investigation and got him on a flight from JFK to Beijing on October 28, 2015. 

Qin is not named in the memo, but Reuters identified him in a September 2016 article through matching his description to property records.

The notes of the FBI phone calls with Lowell from August 2019 obtained by DailyMail.com say he was representing Qin around the time the suspected spy fled the US.

Hunter hired Lowell in December, reportedly causing controversy within his current legal team. It even prompted one, Joshua Levy, to quit, according to the New York Times.

But Lowell has been a towering figure in top Democrat circles for decades – including ties to Hunter’s father.

In 1998 he was hired by House Judiciary Committee Democrats as chief investigative counsel in the fight against Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and argued the case in Congress.

Lowell worked alongside then-Senator Biden, who had previously served as Senate Judiciary Committee Chair, was a member of the committee at the time, and took an active role in the impeachment battle.

In a Washington Post story from 1998 noting Lowell’s appointment by the committee, President Biden’s current personal attorney Robert Bauer, a friend of Lowell, was quoted complimenting the ambitious attorney, telling the Post that he ‘doesn’t shy away from intellectual combat’.

Christopher Tigani says he was not aware of Lowell’s history with Biden when he hired the attorney in 2011 to help him negotiate a cooperation deal with the FBI in which he would wear a wire and try to catch the then-Vice President and his confidants in quid pro quo deals with donors.

The Delaware beer distributor flipped after he was caught flouting campaign finance laws while serving as a bundler for Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign, reimbursing Tigani’s staff for contributions made in their names.

He told Politico that he hired Lowell, who was then at Mcdermott Will & Emery, in February 2011, and the lawyer brokered a meeting for him with the Justice Department.

Despite evidence of Lowell’s later negotiation with federal law enforcement for his clients, the attorney told Tigani he was reluctant to take the case because he didn’t deal with the FBI, according to the 2020 Politico report.

‘Chris, normally I’d say, ‘Yeah, we want to take your case.’ But you already sat down with the FBI and told them everything,’ Tigani said Lowell told him. ‘I don’t even talk to the FBI in court. I don’t even say hi to them in court.’

In an interview with the New York Times, President Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon said of Lowell: ‘You couldn’t get a guy who was more dialed into that D.C.-D.O.J. revolving door and the Democratic establishment.’

Tigani said that he went ahead with the sting, and managed to covertly tape a former Senate staffer in 2011 suggesting the Bidens knowingly took illegal straw donations from bundlers.

But prosecutors didn’t deem the evidence substantial enough and no charges were ever brought against the Vice President or his aides.

Lowell also represented President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner during the Russia investigation in 2017, in which Kushner’s suspect financial relationships with foreign governments including Saudi Arabia were scrutinized.

The New York Times reported that before he began representing Kushner that year, Lowell was investigated by the DoJ over his alleged involvement in a possible ‘bribery-for-pardon scheme,’ as well as potential foreign lobbying violations related to his work for Kushner.

Heavily redacted court documents were unsealed in 2020 showing the probe into a suspected scheme to offer a bribe in exchange for clemency for a tax crimes convict.

Berkeley psychologist Hugh Baras had been sentenced to 30 months in prison for improperly claiming social security benefits. Billionaire real estate developer Sanford Diller enlisted Lowell and Kushner’s help trying to get him clemency, allegedly in exchange for a large political donation.

Diller died in February 2018, Baras did not receive clemency, and an attorney representing Lowell told the Times no bribe was paid. The case was closed without charges.