Yet another Biden insider has been outed as being deeply connected financially to the “green energy” push made by the White House, and this time it is personal for the Biden family.
New Conservative Post wrote earlier that Department of Energy Jennifer Granholm made big bucks owning shares in a company handpicked by the White House to build electric buses. The secretary’s “ethical lapses” have been so astounding that several members of Congress have called for her resignation.
Now it looks like someone even closer to Biden is benefiting from Joe’s policies to fight global warming, climate change, or reducing carbon. Jeff Zients, a longtime confidant to the president who has helped fix Hunter’s screwups and, wouldn’t you believe it, is the current chief of staff in the White House, has been tied to a metal company being supported by the American taxpayer at behest of the president.
As the Biden administration pursues its strategy of building resilient supply chains for the surging clean energy industry, one metals company has seen a substantial boost. Last month, TechMet, which is part-owned by the U.S. government, announced that it had closed a $200 million fundraising round. Celebrating more than $180 million invested in projects around the world over the last year, At the G20 summit last November, President Joe Biden touted a TechMet project in Brazil to mine nickel and cobalt for electric vehicle batteries. And during her trip across Africa earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a U.S.-brokered agreement between TechMet and another company, Lifezone Metals, to mine one of the largest nickel
deposits in the world: Tanzania’s Kabanga mine.
Yet White House chief of staff Jeffrey Zients, whose job involves implementing the administration’s policy, has sidelined himself from the U.S. government’s deepening involvement with TechMet — thanks to what could be perceived as a conflict of interest stemming from his family’s vast wealth, according to The Intercept.
TechMet’s CEO is Brian Menell, a South African mining baron and the brother of Zients’s wife, Mary Menell Zients. Jeffrey Zients disclosed the relationship when he was brought on as chief of staff, the White House said, and recused himself from all matters related to the company. His recusal, which has not been previously reported, was the appropriate move, as ethics experts agree, but it also means the U.S. is operating without its chief quarterback in its dealings with a major player in the green energy transition.
U.S. backing for TechMet dates back to 2020, when the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation put $25 million in the company under President Donald Trump. Last year, the DFC approved another $30 million of investments in the company’s clean energy projects. The Biden administration went on to facilitate a partnership between TechMet and Lifezone in Tanzania, which Harris promoted in March, as part of the Biden administration’s $560 million of support for the East African country. Thanks to U.S. diplomatic and financial coordination, the Tanzanian government partnered with Lifezone to extract nickel from the Kabanga mine in the northwestern part of the country and deliver it to the U.S. and international markets by 2026.
Zients’s relatives, it turns out, had a stake in both sides of the U.S.-brokered agreement around the mine. The Zients Children’s Trust, which was set up for the benefit of Jeffrey Zients’s adult children, owned more than 400,000 shares of Lifezone before it went public on the New York Stock Exchange in July. The company had a successful first day of trading, seeing its shares jump nearly 50 percent. (Zients is not required to disclose the holdings of his adult children. Sharma said that he is not involved with the trust. “He does not have a position with, receive income from, or have a financial interest in the Trust,” she wrote.)
This is not the first time Zients has been connected with some shady business with the Bidens. The current chief of staff reportedly met with Hunter Biden multiple times in 2016. At the time was serving as Obama’s director of the National Economic Council.
The Washington Examiner reported, “The February meeting allegedly involved a meetup between the Bidens, Zients, and billionaire David Rubenstein, who founded the Carlyle Group, a hundred-billion-dollar management firm.
On May 24, 2016, Zients, Hunter Biden, and Bradley met with several people, including Eric Lander, who recently departed from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and former head of the National Cancer Institute, Richard Klausner.
The details of the three meetings are unknown. Hunter Biden has been the subject of severe scrutiny by congressional Republicans for his foreign business dealings.”
Zients has been labeled as the Biden Family’s ‘Mr. Fix It,’ but it is unclear what exactly he was “fixing” for Hunter.” He took over for Ron Klain earlier in the year.
At the time of his appointment, Politico noted that “Zients will be expected to manage the day-to-day workings of a White House that is juggling a growing list of delicate issues — including the ongoing war in Ukraine, looming economic challenges, oversight demands from the new House Republican majority and the ongoing scrutiny over Biden’s handling of classified documents.
A former management consultant widely respected for his leadership skills, Zients was an executive at the Advisory Board Company, a Washington-based consultancy, before founding an investment firm that held stakes in a series of health care and financial firms. During the Obama era, Zients did multiple stints at the Office of Management and Budget as its acting director before being tapped to fix the botched launch of HealthCare.gov.”
For some reason, his financial profiteering from “green energy” were left out of his biography pitched to the public.
This article originally appeared on New Conservative Post. Used with Permission.
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