Michael Pillsbury, President Donald Trump’s informal adviser on China, can’t seem to decide whether China gave him dirt on 2020 candidate Joe Biden’s son or not.
On Wednesday night, Pillsbury told Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs that he had brought up Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, to his Chinese associates during a trip to Beijing a week ago (the same week Trump openly asked China and Ukraine to investigate Biden).
However, Pillsbury said the Chinese refused to tell him anything.
“I’ve never seen them get so secretive in my entire life,” he told Dobbs.
Informal Trump adviser on China says he brought up Hunter Biden during his trip to Beijing pic.twitter.com/haPdravmd5
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) October 10, 2019
But in an interview with the Financial Times several hours later, Pillsbury said the complete opposite.
“I got a quite a bit of background on Hunter Biden from the Chinese,” he bragged.
The adviser told the Financial Times that the information was related to the alleged $1.5 billion Hunter received from China, a baseless conspiracy theory Trump and his allies have been peddling over recent weeks.
On Thursday morning, Pillsbury was back to claiming he hadn’t gotten any information from the Chinese and bizarrely asserted he hadn’t given an interview to the Financial Times, even though the reporter has screenshots of their exchange.
“The Chinese did not give me any intelligence on Hunter Biden,” Pillsbury said during an interview on C-Span. “I don’t know where the report came from.”
He said he hadn’t spoken to the Financial Times “for a month.”
In an interview with McClatchy later on Thursday, Pillsbury seemed to have found a middle ground.
“The information the Chinese gave me is just from the newspaper stories–nothing new,” he said.
