Former Vice President Joe Biden took “billions of dollars in bribes from the Chinese government,” Steve Hilton, host of Fox News Channel’s The Next Revolution, told hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak during an interview on Breitbart News Tonight on Tuesday.

On April 28, Hilton laid out details of financial dealings between Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s second son, and foreign governments, companies, and oligarchs.

The Biden family’s financial ties to the Chinese state will become a central election issue if the former vice president secures the Democrats’ presidential nomination for 2020, predicted Hilton.

LISTEN:



“If [Joe Biden] is [nominated], it will be the central issue, actually, because there’s no question that the number one strategic priority for the next president will be keeping America ahead in the face of China’s implacable determination to topple the U.S.A. as the world’s superpower,” said Hilton.

Hilton continued, “That is not some scare story. That is what [Chinese officials] have said in their speeches and written in their books. It is very clearly stated. Their goal is to topple America and take back what they see as their rightful place as the world’s superpower, and they want to do it on their terms.”

“They don’t want to do it by joining our system and beating us at our own game,” said Hilton of China’s geopolitical ambition to displace America as the world’s leading superpower. “They want to change the game. They want to continue with their authoritarian one-party rule system of governance and spread that as an empire all around the world.”

Hilton warned, “They have various plans that they are currently to deliver that: the One Belt, One Road infrastructure initiative, the Made in China 2025 plan to dominate the ten big industries of the future and so on. This is a really serious effort on their part.”

President Donald Trump, assessed Hilton, broke from the status quo of Western appeasement and facilitation of China’s global ascendance.

Hilton remarked, “President Trump is not just the first American president, but the first Western leader in any country in about 50 years to actually wake up to this, recognize, and say, ‘No, we’re not just going to sit idly by and allow China to overtake us and hope that by being nice to them, they’ll play nice with us.’ We know that’s not true.”

Hilton went on, “In his very simple but effective way, President Trump has said there’s only one language [Chinese authorities] understand, and that is the language of strength. We don’t want to go to war with them militarily, but we’ve got one very important weapon which is the economic weapon, and he’s going to apply it — tariffs — and it’s already having an effect because the source of China’s strength and ability to pursue this goal of world domination is its economy, and the economy is based on being the manufacturing center for the world.”

Hilton continued, “We participate in that. We built China up by relocating manufacturing to China. The effect of the tariffs is brutally clear, [and] it’s to undermine that, and it’s already having that effect. It’s already causing global companies to relocate their supply chains. They’re saying, ”Look, this is too risky. We don’t want to be in China. Let’s move.’ Whether to Vietnam or to India, or wherever, that’s a plus, in some cases, even back to America. That is not good news for China. That’s why I think that, actually, this is a serious long-term strategy that we need to stick to.”

Hilton contrasted Donald Trump’s view of, and approach towards, China with Joe Biden’s, assessing the latter as “compromised” by “corruption” via the Chinese government’s procurement of influence through his son.

“President Trump is playing a heroic role,” determined Hilton. “I think it literally could be the most consequential political decision of the 21st century, and, by contrast, Joe Biden. You use the word ‘compromised.’ That’s the word I keep talking about because on this most central of issues, he is literally compromised. Why? Because he has taken — and I’m going to put it in very strong terms, but I believe it’s completely fair — he personally has taken billions of dollars in bribes from the Chinese government in the form of direct payments to his son’s businesses.”

“There’s no other way to look at those payments other than bribes to Joe Biden,” assessed Hilton. “They happened when he was vice president at a time when he was softening America’s position on China.”

Hilton recalled, “[Joe Biden] actually traveled to China at a time when China was aggressively maneuvering in the South China Sea, and Japan and our other allies were looking to America to take a tough response, and Joe Biden did the exact opposite. When he went there, with him on that trip — literally flying with him on his official jet was his son Hunter — who then proceeded to ink a whole bunch of business deals, uniquely with the Chinese government, putting money into joint investment funds with an American company that had never been offered to any other company before, to a guy, Hunter Biden, who had never done business in China before [and] had never done business of that kind.”

“There’s no other way to interpret that than as a bribe to Joe Biden,” estimated Hilton, before giving an overview of this week’s forthcoming edition of The Next Revolution.

Hilton shared, “That business still continues, and, in fact, has expanded. We’re learning more about it every day. In fact, this Sunday on my show, I’m going to be doing an update with new information not in Peter Schweizer’s book, about the investments that this joint venture has made and how Hunter Biden and the Biden family business are getting more and more enmeshed in the authoritarian regime in Beijing. So he’s completely compromised, and I think it’s disqualifying. So if he is the nominee, I think this will be the central issue, and I’m certainly going to do my best to make it so.”

“You can be sure that if Biden were elected, he’d go straight back to that policy of appeasement. We now know that part of that is personal corruption,” concluded Hilton.

Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.