He claimed to have dirt on the Bidens. Now the DoJ say he’s a Chinese spy. Who is Gal Luft?

The news that an eight-count indictment against Israeli professor and think tank co-founder Gal Luft had been unsealed in the Southern District of New York appeared on Tuesday in a small, 137-word item on page 10 of the New York Post.

Under the headline “Anti-Biden witness indicted,” the Post described Mr Luft, 57, as “a key figure in House Republicans' investigation of the Biden family” and said the charges against him are for “arms trafficking and conspiring to flout US sanctions on Iran”.

The author of the short article also closed out the piece with a line about how Mr Luft claims the case against him was “meant to stop him from testifying to a House Committee about allegations that the first family received payments from individuals with ties to Chinese military intelligence, and that the Bidens had an FBI mole who shared classified information with their Chinese benefactors”. But aside from those 137 words, that was all the famously anti-Biden tabloid had to say on the matter.

That back-of-the-paper treatment was a far cry from how Mr Luft had been covered just days before, when the Post columnist Miranda Devine — a frequent purveyor of conspiracy theories and outrageous allegations regarding President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden – had published a column reporting exclusively on a video the accused arms broker had sent her to claim he was being “hunted” by the FBI and considering spending “the rest of his life on the run”.

Mr Luft’s dispatch to the Post came from parts unknown, as he has been a fugitive since February of this year.

He disappeared shortly after posting bail following his arrest by Cypriot authorities pursuant to an Interpol warrant on suspicion of arms trafficking.

At the time, he wrote on Twitter that the arrest was part of a “politically motivated extradition request” by the United States.

“I've been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the US … claiming I'm an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren't tragic. I've never been an arms dealer. DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim [and] Hunter Biden,” he said.

Mr Luft’s Israeli lawyer, Mordechai Tzivin, told Ynet that his client was being targeted because he provided derogatory information about the Bidens to the FBI in 2019.

The accusations "would be a good way to shut him up," Mr Tzivin said, “because he knows a lot of information on Hunter”.

He added that it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that prominent Democrats would try to have his client killed.

“If this would have happened in Russia, they would have carried out a 'diplomatic car crash,' but luckily, he is in a safe location where no one can hurt him,” he said.

Despite Mr Luft’s claim that the charges against him coincided with his emergence as a figure in the Republican-led crusade to tar Mr Biden and his family with corruption allegations, it’s not clear from the public record that he ever said a word about Mr Biden or his son prior to his arrest.

But the Israeli-American academic, who was once a Lieutenant Colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces and has more recently served as the co-director of the DC-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, has been critical of the turn US foreign policy has taken since Mr Biden took office with the aim of restoring relations with America’s democratic allies and sunsetting what Democrats have described as the dictator-friendly policies of his predecessor.

In January, his think tank released a report which accused the US of "pursuing illegal economic policies" by way of an "extremely trigger-happy" use of sanctions, most notably against Russia.

And last year, he appeared on CNBC to criticise the Biden administration’s efforts to impose a worldwide oil price cap on Russian oil to keep Moscow from using petrodollars to finance the war in Ukraine.

"It's kind of a ridiculous idea in my view," he said. "That's not how the oil market works," he said. "This is a very sophisticated market, you cannot force the prices down."

He also spoke to the South China Morning Post in August of last year about who the Chinese government would tap to lead its foreign ministry after that year’s Communist Party Congress, and last September penned an op-ed for the same publication in which he complained that the Ukraine war had become “a quagmire” and ridiculed Mr Biden’s prediction that US sanctions would have an effect on Moscow’s economy.

“To date, Russia’s economy has contracted by 4 per cent – a far cry from US President Joe Biden’s suggestion at the beginning of the war that it would halve. If anyone is nearing implosion, it is probably Europe’s heavily indebted economies, facing an unprecedented pre-winter energy crisis, inflation, deindustrialisation and a growing social unrest already causing fissures in the Western alliance,” he said.

Indeed, the first mention of Mr Luft’s claims against the Bidens came in that February post-arrest tweet.

And though Republicans have now embraced his claims to have been speaking out against the president and his family since 2019, there’s no evidence that he voiced his alleged concerns to anyone, even though allegations — thus far unproven — about the president and his son have been a fast-track to stardom in GOP media circles since former president Donald Trump’s first impeachment kicked off in July of that year.

Based on that pattern, it might be reasonable for one to conclude that Mr Luft is hoping to garner himself enough goodwill among the GOP that should he remain a fugitive through the next presidential inauguration, a future Republican president — perhaps Mr Trump — will pardon him.