President Donald Trump has been trying to portray former Vice President Joe Biden as a pawn of the Chinese government — but a new report from Politico claims that the president is literally tens of millions of dollars in debt to a Chinese state-owned bank.
According to the report, a Trump real estate partner in 2012 initiated a $1 billion refinance scheme for a skyscraper at 1290 Avenue of the Americas in New York in which Trump owns a 30 percent stake.
“The debt includes $211 million from the state-owned Bank of China — its first loan of this kind in the U.S. — which matures in the middle of what could be Trump’s second term, financial records show,” the publication writes. “Trump’s ownership of the building received a smattering of attention before and after his 2016 campaign. But the arrangement with the Bank of China — and its impending due date in 2022 — has gone largely unnoticed.”
The report notes that Trump’s debt to the Chinese bank could complicate his efforts to tie Hunter Biden to purportedly illicit financial dealings in China.
“Trump’s recent criticisms of China have been muddied by his own mixed messaging as well as by his numerous financial ties to the country,”Politico writes. “Those connections extend far beyond the Avenue of the America’s loan: Chinese state-owned companies are constructing two luxury Trump developments in United Arab Emirates and Indonesia.”