How five members of Joe Biden’s family got rich through his connections
January 18, 2020
Political figures have long used their families to route power and benefits for their own self-enrichment. In my new book, “Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite,” one particular politician — Joe Biden — emerges as the king of the sweetheart deal, with no less than five family members benefiting from his largesse, favorable access and powerful position for commercial gain. In Biden’s case, these deals include foreign partners and, in some cases, even US taxpayer dollars.
The Biden family’s apparent self-enrichment involves five family members: Joe’s son Hunter, son-in-law Howard, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie.
When this subject came up in 2019, Biden lied, “I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else — even distant family — about their business interests. Period.”
As we will see, this is far from the case …
James and Sara Biden
Joe Biden’s younger brother, James, has been an integral part of the family political machine from the earliest days when he served as finance chair of Joe’s 1972 Senate campaign, and the two have remained quite close. After Joe joined the US Senate, he would bring his brother James along on congressional delegation trips to places like Ireland, Rome and Africa.
When Joe became vice president, James was a welcomed guest at the White House, securing invitations to such important functions as a state dinner in 2011 and the visit of Pope Francis in 2015. Sometimes, James’ White House visits dovetailed with his overseas business dealings, and his commercial opportunities flourished during his brother’s tenure as vice president.
Consider the case of HillStone International, a subsidiary of the huge construction management firm Hill International. The president of HillStone International was Kevin Justice, who grew up in Delaware and was a longtime Biden family friend. On Nov. 4, 2010, according to White House visitors’ logs, Justice visited the White House and met with Biden adviser Michele Smith in the Office of the Vice President.
Less than three weeks later, HillStone announced that James Biden would be joining the firm as an executive vice president. James appeared to have little or no background in housing construction, but that did not seem to matter to HillStone. His bio on the company’s website noted his “40 years of experience dealing with principals in business, political, legal and financial circles across the nation and internationally…”
James Biden was joining HillStone just as the firm was starting negotiations to win a massive contract in war-torn Iraq. Six months later, the firm announced a contract to build 100,000 homes. It was part of a $35 billion, 500,000-unit project deal won by TRAC Development, a South Korean company. HillStone also received a $22 million US federal government contract to manage a construction project for the State Department.
David Richter, son of the parent company’s founder, was not shy in explaining HillStone’s success in securing government contracts. It really helps, he told investors at a private meeting, to have “the brother of the vice president as a partner,” according to someone who was there.
The Iraq project was massive, perhaps the single most lucrative project for the firm ever. In 2012, Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business reported that HillStone officials expected the project to “generate $1.5 billion in revenues over the next three years.” That amounted to more than three times the revenue the company produced in 2011.
A group of minority partners, including James Biden, stood to split about $735 million. “There’s plenty of money for everyone if this project goes through,” said one company official.
The deal was all set, but HillStone made a crucial error. In 2013, the firm was forced to back out of the contract because of a series of problems, including a lack of experience by Hill and TRAC Development, its South Korean associate firm. But HillStone continued doing significant contract work in the embattled country, including a six-year contract with the US Army Corps of Engineers.
James Biden remained with Hill International, which accumulated contracts from the federal government for dozens of projects, including projects in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mozambique and elsewhere.
With the election of his father as vice president, Hunter Biden launched businesses fused to his father’s power that led him to lucrative deals with a rogue’s gallery of governments and oligarchs around the world.
Sometimes he would hitch a prominent ride with his father aboard Air Force Two to visit a country where he was courting business. Other times, the deals would be done more discreetly. Always they involved foreign entities that appeared to be seeking something from his father.
There was, for example, Hunter’s involvement with an entity called Burnham Financial Group, where his business partner Devon Archer — who’d been at Yale with Hunter — sat on the board of directors. Burnham became the vehicle for a number of murky deals abroad, involving connected oligarchs in Kazakhstan and state-owned businesses in China.
But one of the most troubling Burnham ventures was here in the United States, in which Burnham became the center of a federal investigation involving a $60 million fraud scheme against one of the poorest Indian tribes in America, the Oglala Sioux.
Devon Archer was arrested in New York in May 2016 and charged with “orchestrating a scheme to defraud investors and a Native American tribal entity of tens of millions of dollars.” Other victims of the fraud included several public and union pension plans.
Although Hunter Biden was not charged in the case, his fingerprints were all over Burnham. The “legitimacy” that his name and political status as the vice president’s son lent to the plan was brought up repeatedly in the trial.
The scheme was explicitly designed to target pension funds that had “socially responsible investing” clauses, including pension funds of labor union organizations that had publicly supported Joe Biden’s political campaigns in the past.
Indeed, eight of the 11 pension funds that lost their money were either government employee or labor union pension funds. Joe Biden has “a long-standing alliance with labor.” He closely identifies with organized labor. “I make no apologies,” he has said. “I am a union man, period.” And many public unions have endorsed him over the years.
Transcripts from Archer’s trial offer a clearer picture of Hunter Biden’s role at Burnham Asset Management, in particular, the fact that the firm relied on his father’s name and political status as a means of both recruiting pension money into the scheme and alleviating investors’ concerns.
Tim Anderson, a lawyer who did legal work on the issuance of the tribal bonds, recounts seeing Hunter while visiting the Burnham office in New York City to meet with Bevan Cooney, who was later convicted in the case.
The political ties that Biden and Archer had were considered key to the Burnham brand. As stated in an August 2014 email, Jason Galanis, who was convicted in the bond scheme, agreed with an unidentified associate who also thought the company had “value beyond capital” because of their political connections.
In the closing arguments at the trial, one of Archer’s defense attorneys, Matthew Schwartz, explained to the jury that it was impossible to talk about the bond scheme without mentioning Hunter Biden’s name. This “was perfectly sensible,” according to Schwartz, “because Hunter Biden was part of the Burnham team.”
(There are many more business deals that involved Hunter.)
Flashback: Hunter Biden got paid huge money from a credit card company while Joe worked on major credit card legislation. After he graduated from Yale Law School, was hired by MBNA Bank as a lawyer. Just two years later, he was promoted to senior vice president, not bad for a 20-something year old inexperienced attorney.
Biden then went on to work at the Commerce Department between the years 1998-2001, when he was then hired back by MBNA on a consulting contract. He earned a 6-figure “consulting” position with MBNA, which at the time was one of the largest credit card companies in the USA.
While at Commerce, Hunter Biden, with no experienced in the so-called “dot-com” industry, was appointed “executive director of e-commerce policy coordination” while earning a nifty six-figure salary plus bonuses.
Quite ironically, Joe Biden at the time, as a United States Senator, was working on legislation which would have made it extremely difficult for consumers to eliminate credit card debt in bankruptcy proceedings. Hmmm. Wonder what that “consulting” position involved.
While the focus has been on the recent bombshell revelations about Hunter Biden and sweetheart deals involving China and Ukraine while his father was vice president, digging back further shows that this type of questionable activity has been going on for a long time with the Biden’s. According to The Federalist, Hunter Biden was earning lucrative salaries going all the way back to when he graduated from college.
During the time when Hunter Biden “consulted” for MBNA, the financial services industry was embroiled in trying to obtain relief from Congress due to an increase in bankruptcies, which was affecting their profits.
While this was occurring, MBNA began to donate large amounts of money to politicians across the political spectrum in order to ostensibly buy their support for the legislation. Among those receiving money was then Sen. Joe Biden, with MBNA being his largest donor.
In addition, executives and employees at MBNA donated $214,000 in total to Biden’s campaigns, with one top executive at the company buying Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home for more than $200,000 over market value.
In addition, the bank flew Biden and his wife to various events and covered their travel costs, campaign disclosure documents showed.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, NBC News’ Tom Brokaw, in committing an accidental case of journalism, questioned Biden on a potential conflict of interest for protecting the interests of MBNA while his son was on the payroll.
In one document they reviewed, it found that an associate of Joe Biden had found employment for Hunter as a special favor for the elder Biden, who at the time was a Senate leader who was once again running for president. He was able to get Hunter a $1.2 million deal on Wall Street, even though Hunter Biden had no experience in high finance. Kind of like Burisma, right?
What came out of that? Well according to RCI, many of his patrons ended up with “legislation and policies favorable to their businesses or investments,” RCI found in reviewing lobbying records and legislative actions taken by then Sen. Biden.
Joe Biden has claimed for years, especially recently, that his position as either a United States Senator or as vice president had not created a conflict of interest with any activities conducted by his son Hunter, and had also claimed that he “never discussed” Hunter Biden’s business activities with his son.
However, where there is smoke, there’s fire and there is plenty of smoke surrounding Hunter Biden, especially considering the emails which were recently discovered on his abandoned computer.
“Hunter Biden’s Ukraine-China connections are just one element of the Biden corruption story,” says Tom Fitton, president of the Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group Judicial Watch.
The group claims that Biden has used his official positions in Washington to advance the personal interests of his son, Hunter.
Hunter Biden, who has been for quite some time a chronic abuser of alcohol and drugs has appeared vastly underqualified for positions which he has been able to attain.
He has been in and out of at least six drug-rehab treatment programs, published reports say, and has used crack cocaine, among other drugs. Twice he’s been the subject of drug-related investigations by police, in 1988 and again in 2016, according to federal records. In 2014, he was discharged from the United States Naval Reserve subsequent to another drug investigation.
According to the family friend, Robert Skomorucha, he said in a press interview that Hunter Biden had “a very strong last name that really paid off in terms of our lobbying efforts.”
In 2007, Hunter Biden had dinner with a lobbyist for a private prison, who was appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee of which Joe Biden served as chairman, published reports said. According to Senate rules, it bars members or their staff from any contact with family members who are lobbyists attempting to influence legislation.
Besides making Hunter Biden a wealthy lobbyist, Oldaker also helped him to secure a $1 million loan through a bank he co-founded, which was used for an investment scheme that eventually failed.
Incidentally the bank Oldaker co-founded, Washington First, was the beneficiary of hundreds of thousands of dollars of Joe Biden campaign and PAC donations, while at the same time diverting hundreds of thousands of the same moneys to Oldaker, Biden & Belair, the Washington lobbying firm where Hunter Biden was a partner.
By 2006, Hunter Biden was looking for a new line of work, while at the same time Joe Biden was considering yet another run for the White House. Joe Biden was attempting to get Hunter out of the lobbying business to avoid any “conflict of interest” allegations while Biden was considering a run for president.
Biden asked his brother, Jim to reach out to a mutual family friend, Anthony Lotito in order to help Hunter Biden get out of the lobbying business. Lotito agreed to help Hunter as a favor to Joe Biden, who had served on the Senate Banking Committee.
According to Lotito in court documents (filed in connection with a court filing in New York where Lotito filed suit against Hunter Biden in a related venture), he said that Joe Biden assumed that “the financial community might be a good starting place in which to seek out employment on Hunter’s behalf.” However, Wall Street had “no interest” in hiring Hunter Biden.
Rebuffed on Wall Street, the Bidens decided to buy a hedge fund, where “Hunter would then assume a senior executive position with the company.” Lotito actually helped to facilitate the deal.
Once again, with zero experience on Wall Street, Hunter Biden was appointed interim CEO and president of the Paradigm Investment Fund, earning a cool $1.2 million salary, SEC filings showed. Lotito joined the firm as a partner, and agreed to walk Hunter Biden through his new role in the world of high-finance.
The complaint Lotito filed said, “Given Hunter Biden’s inexperience in the securities industry,” it was agreed that Lotito would keep an office at the hedge fund’s New York headquarters, “in order to assist Biden in discharging his duties as president.”
The venture went down in flames, after which Lotito sued the Bidens for fraud. They countersued, and the two sides settled in 2008.
During the years 2006-2009, at the same time the failed hedge fund was active, Hunter Biden was appointed as vice chairman of Amtrak, the taxpayer subsidized rail line. Once again, Hunter Biden had absolutely no experience in the rail industry.
So, what were his qualifications? In a 2006 statement to the Senate during his confirmation, he said he was qualified to be on the Amtrak board because—get ready—“as a frequent commuter and Amtrak customer for over 30 7ears, I have literally logged thousands of miles on Amtrak.”
He seriously said that. We suppose it’s like staying at a Holiday Inn Express…suddenly you are an expert because you were a customer.
Ironically (or not), Amtrak has acted as a major supporter of Joe Biden, while donating to his senate and presidential campaigns, and even naming a train station after him in Wilmington.
In a little bit of quid pro quo, Biden has encouraged taxpayer subsidies for the government subsidized railroad during his time in Washington.
Hunter Biden also enriched himself using his father’s name through:
Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC- co-founded five months after Biden became vice president; three months after it was setup, secured $24 million in loans through a federal program called TALF, which was designed to help bail out banks and auto lenders hit by financial crisis; within months the group had secured $130 million from the program, with some of the cash funneled into an investment fund incorporated in the Cayman Islands (ding, ding, ding), which is often used as a shelter to evade taxes, according to SEC.
Yet another subsidiary spun off years later told investors that board adviser Hunter was politically connected, highlighting in their prospectus that he was the “son of Vice President Biden.
Eudora Global- yet another investment firm which Hunter Biden claimed to have set up; however, articles of incorporation show it was actually a major Biden donor, Jeffrey Cooper who put Biden on the board after he became vice president.
Cooper ironically ran one of the largest asbestos-litigation firms in the US, and convinced Biden to make it easier to file asbestos lawsuits by shooting down tort reform. While the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden blocked reform on asbestos litigation whenever such bills reached the Senate floor.
Cooper’s law firm directly lobbied Biden’s office to kill such bills and donated $200,000 to Biden’s campaigns over the years; during Biden’s failed 2007-2008 run for president, Simmons Cooper donated $53,000 to his campaign.
After Joe Biden became vice president, Hunter Biden landed yet another cushy job at a New York-based law firm, which had strong ties to the Clintons, giving him the title of “counsel.” The firm, Boies Schiller Flexner LLP brought Hunter Biden on board after the Bidens had hired the firm to defend Hunter against fraud charges filed in an investment venture. The case was dismissed.
Boies was also tied into Ukraine, with a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch who was being investigated and desperate to repair his reputation sending large payments to Boies to compensate Hunter Biden for unspecified work.
The oligarch, who ran Burisma Holdings paid Boies $283,000 right at the same time when Joe Biden was directed by Barack Obama to oversee U.S. energy policy in Ukraine. Boies Schiller donated over $50,000 to Biden’s campaigns, according to FEC filings.
Besides Burisma and Ukraine, one of the most glaring issues in which Hunter Biden was involved was with a company called BHR Partners.
Just after Biden was named to be the so-called “point man” on U.S.-China policy, Rosemont Seneca setup a joint venture with the Bank of China called BHR, which was worth over $1 billion. Ironically, Hunter Biden was named vice chairman and director of the new venture. How weird is that!
The new venture received an investment deal, the first of its kind, with the Chinese government right around the same time that Joe Biden was going to China to meet with communist leaders.
According to Secret Service records, Hunter Biden accompanied his father to China on Air Force Two and it was during that junket that Hunter Biden facilitated the new deal.
In fact, Hunter Biden arranged for hone of his Chinese partners to shake hands with his father, the vice president. BHR was registered only 12 days later, and the Chinese government in Beijing cleared the deal and issued a business license shortly thereafter.
According to Peter Schweizer of the Government Accountability Institute, “no one else had such an arrangement in China.”
When criticism mounted over what appeared to be a significant conflict of interest over the deal, Hunter Biden resigned from the board; however, he did not divest his 10 percent equity stake in the fund, which is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars.
Have you ever wondered by Joe Biden can afford four mansions on the salary of a government employee? Now you know.
Hunter Biden said in an interview that HE IS ABSOLUTELY CONFIDENT HE WILL BE EXONERATED BY HIS FATHER'S JUSTICE DEPARTMENT.
January 18, 2020
Political figures have long used their families to route power and benefits for their own self-enrichment. In my new book, “Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite,” one particular politician — Joe Biden — emerges as the king of the sweetheart deal, with no less than five family members benefiting from his largesse, favorable access and powerful position for commercial gain. In Biden’s case, these deals include foreign partners and, in some cases, even US taxpayer dollars.
The Biden family’s apparent self-enrichment involves five family members: Joe’s son Hunter, son-in-law Howard, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie.
When this subject came up in 2019, Biden lied, “I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else — even distant family — about their business interests. Period.”
As we will see, this is far from the case …
James and Sara Biden
Joe Biden’s younger brother, James, has been an integral part of the family political machine from the earliest days when he served as finance chair of Joe’s 1972 Senate campaign, and the two have remained quite close. After Joe joined the US Senate, he would bring his brother James along on congressional delegation trips to places like Ireland, Rome and Africa.
When Joe became vice president, James was a welcomed guest at the White House, securing invitations to such important functions as a state dinner in 2011 and the visit of Pope Francis in 2015. Sometimes, James’ White House visits dovetailed with his overseas business dealings, and his commercial opportunities flourished during his brother’s tenure as vice president.
Consider the case of HillStone International, a subsidiary of the huge construction management firm Hill International. The president of HillStone International was Kevin Justice, who grew up in Delaware and was a longtime Biden family friend. On Nov. 4, 2010, according to White House visitors’ logs, Justice visited the White House and met with Biden adviser Michele Smith in the Office of the Vice President.
Less than three weeks later, HillStone announced that James Biden would be joining the firm as an executive vice president. James appeared to have little or no background in housing construction, but that did not seem to matter to HillStone. His bio on the company’s website noted his “40 years of experience dealing with principals in business, political, legal and financial circles across the nation and internationally…”
James Biden was joining HillStone just as the firm was starting negotiations to win a massive contract in war-torn Iraq. Six months later, the firm announced a contract to build 100,000 homes. It was part of a $35 billion, 500,000-unit project deal won by TRAC Development, a South Korean company. HillStone also received a $22 million US federal government contract to manage a construction project for the State Department.
David Richter, son of the parent company’s founder, was not shy in explaining HillStone’s success in securing government contracts. It really helps, he told investors at a private meeting, to have “the brother of the vice president as a partner,” according to someone who was there.
The Iraq project was massive, perhaps the single most lucrative project for the firm ever. In 2012, Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business reported that HillStone officials expected the project to “generate $1.5 billion in revenues over the next three years.” That amounted to more than three times the revenue the company produced in 2011.
A group of minority partners, including James Biden, stood to split about $735 million. “There’s plenty of money for everyone if this project goes through,” said one company official.
The deal was all set, but HillStone made a crucial error. In 2013, the firm was forced to back out of the contract because of a series of problems, including a lack of experience by Hill and TRAC Development, its South Korean associate firm. But HillStone continued doing significant contract work in the embattled country, including a six-year contract with the US Army Corps of Engineers.
James Biden remained with Hill International, which accumulated contracts from the federal government for dozens of projects, including projects in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mozambique and elsewhere.
With the election of his father as vice president, Hunter Biden launched businesses fused to his father’s power that led him to lucrative deals with a rogue’s gallery of governments and oligarchs around the world.
Sometimes he would hitch a prominent ride with his father aboard Air Force Two to visit a country where he was courting business. Other times, the deals would be done more discreetly. Always they involved foreign entities that appeared to be seeking something from his father.
There was, for example, Hunter’s involvement with an entity called Burnham Financial Group, where his business partner Devon Archer — who’d been at Yale with Hunter — sat on the board of directors. Burnham became the vehicle for a number of murky deals abroad, involving connected oligarchs in Kazakhstan and state-owned businesses in China.
But one of the most troubling Burnham ventures was here in the United States, in which Burnham became the center of a federal investigation involving a $60 million fraud scheme against one of the poorest Indian tribes in America, the Oglala Sioux.
Devon Archer was arrested in New York in May 2016 and charged with “orchestrating a scheme to defraud investors and a Native American tribal entity of tens of millions of dollars.” Other victims of the fraud included several public and union pension plans.
Although Hunter Biden was not charged in the case, his fingerprints were all over Burnham. The “legitimacy” that his name and political status as the vice president’s son lent to the plan was brought up repeatedly in the trial.
The scheme was explicitly designed to target pension funds that had “socially responsible investing” clauses, including pension funds of labor union organizations that had publicly supported Joe Biden’s political campaigns in the past.
Indeed, eight of the 11 pension funds that lost their money were either government employee or labor union pension funds. Joe Biden has “a long-standing alliance with labor.” He closely identifies with organized labor. “I make no apologies,” he has said. “I am a union man, period.” And many public unions have endorsed him over the years.
Transcripts from Archer’s trial offer a clearer picture of Hunter Biden’s role at Burnham Asset Management, in particular, the fact that the firm relied on his father’s name and political status as a means of both recruiting pension money into the scheme and alleviating investors’ concerns.
Tim Anderson, a lawyer who did legal work on the issuance of the tribal bonds, recounts seeing Hunter while visiting the Burnham office in New York City to meet with Bevan Cooney, who was later convicted in the case.
The political ties that Biden and Archer had were considered key to the Burnham brand. As stated in an August 2014 email, Jason Galanis, who was convicted in the bond scheme, agreed with an unidentified associate who also thought the company had “value beyond capital” because of their political connections.
In the closing arguments at the trial, one of Archer’s defense attorneys, Matthew Schwartz, explained to the jury that it was impossible to talk about the bond scheme without mentioning Hunter Biden’s name. This “was perfectly sensible,” according to Schwartz, “because Hunter Biden was part of the Burnham team.”
(There are many more business deals that involved Hunter.)
Flashback: Hunter Biden got paid huge money from a credit card company while Joe worked on major credit card legislation. After he graduated from Yale Law School, was hired by MBNA Bank as a lawyer. Just two years later, he was promoted to senior vice president, not bad for a 20-something year old inexperienced attorney.
Biden then went on to work at the Commerce Department between the years 1998-2001, when he was then hired back by MBNA on a consulting contract. He earned a 6-figure “consulting” position with MBNA, which at the time was one of the largest credit card companies in the USA.
While at Commerce, Hunter Biden, with no experienced in the so-called “dot-com” industry, was appointed “executive director of e-commerce policy coordination” while earning a nifty six-figure salary plus bonuses.
Quite ironically, Joe Biden at the time, as a United States Senator, was working on legislation which would have made it extremely difficult for consumers to eliminate credit card debt in bankruptcy proceedings. Hmmm. Wonder what that “consulting” position involved.
While the focus has been on the recent bombshell revelations about Hunter Biden and sweetheart deals involving China and Ukraine while his father was vice president, digging back further shows that this type of questionable activity has been going on for a long time with the Biden’s. According to The Federalist, Hunter Biden was earning lucrative salaries going all the way back to when he graduated from college.
During the time when Hunter Biden “consulted” for MBNA, the financial services industry was embroiled in trying to obtain relief from Congress due to an increase in bankruptcies, which was affecting their profits.
While this was occurring, MBNA began to donate large amounts of money to politicians across the political spectrum in order to ostensibly buy their support for the legislation. Among those receiving money was then Sen. Joe Biden, with MBNA being his largest donor.
In addition, executives and employees at MBNA donated $214,000 in total to Biden’s campaigns, with one top executive at the company buying Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home for more than $200,000 over market value.
In addition, the bank flew Biden and his wife to various events and covered their travel costs, campaign disclosure documents showed.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, NBC News’ Tom Brokaw, in committing an accidental case of journalism, questioned Biden on a potential conflict of interest for protecting the interests of MBNA while his son was on the payroll.
In one document they reviewed, it found that an associate of Joe Biden had found employment for Hunter as a special favor for the elder Biden, who at the time was a Senate leader who was once again running for president. He was able to get Hunter a $1.2 million deal on Wall Street, even though Hunter Biden had no experience in high finance. Kind of like Burisma, right?
What came out of that? Well according to RCI, many of his patrons ended up with “legislation and policies favorable to their businesses or investments,” RCI found in reviewing lobbying records and legislative actions taken by then Sen. Biden.
Joe Biden has claimed for years, especially recently, that his position as either a United States Senator or as vice president had not created a conflict of interest with any activities conducted by his son Hunter, and had also claimed that he “never discussed” Hunter Biden’s business activities with his son.
However, where there is smoke, there’s fire and there is plenty of smoke surrounding Hunter Biden, especially considering the emails which were recently discovered on his abandoned computer.
“Hunter Biden’s Ukraine-China connections are just one element of the Biden corruption story,” says Tom Fitton, president of the Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group Judicial Watch.
The group claims that Biden has used his official positions in Washington to advance the personal interests of his son, Hunter.
Hunter Biden, who has been for quite some time a chronic abuser of alcohol and drugs has appeared vastly underqualified for positions which he has been able to attain.
He has been in and out of at least six drug-rehab treatment programs, published reports say, and has used crack cocaine, among other drugs. Twice he’s been the subject of drug-related investigations by police, in 1988 and again in 2016, according to federal records. In 2014, he was discharged from the United States Naval Reserve subsequent to another drug investigation.
According to the family friend, Robert Skomorucha, he said in a press interview that Hunter Biden had “a very strong last name that really paid off in terms of our lobbying efforts.”
In 2007, Hunter Biden had dinner with a lobbyist for a private prison, who was appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee of which Joe Biden served as chairman, published reports said. According to Senate rules, it bars members or their staff from any contact with family members who are lobbyists attempting to influence legislation.
Besides making Hunter Biden a wealthy lobbyist, Oldaker also helped him to secure a $1 million loan through a bank he co-founded, which was used for an investment scheme that eventually failed.
Incidentally the bank Oldaker co-founded, Washington First, was the beneficiary of hundreds of thousands of dollars of Joe Biden campaign and PAC donations, while at the same time diverting hundreds of thousands of the same moneys to Oldaker, Biden & Belair, the Washington lobbying firm where Hunter Biden was a partner.
By 2006, Hunter Biden was looking for a new line of work, while at the same time Joe Biden was considering yet another run for the White House. Joe Biden was attempting to get Hunter out of the lobbying business to avoid any “conflict of interest” allegations while Biden was considering a run for president.
Biden asked his brother, Jim to reach out to a mutual family friend, Anthony Lotito in order to help Hunter Biden get out of the lobbying business. Lotito agreed to help Hunter as a favor to Joe Biden, who had served on the Senate Banking Committee.
According to Lotito in court documents (filed in connection with a court filing in New York where Lotito filed suit against Hunter Biden in a related venture), he said that Joe Biden assumed that “the financial community might be a good starting place in which to seek out employment on Hunter’s behalf.” However, Wall Street had “no interest” in hiring Hunter Biden.
Rebuffed on Wall Street, the Bidens decided to buy a hedge fund, where “Hunter would then assume a senior executive position with the company.” Lotito actually helped to facilitate the deal.
Once again, with zero experience on Wall Street, Hunter Biden was appointed interim CEO and president of the Paradigm Investment Fund, earning a cool $1.2 million salary, SEC filings showed. Lotito joined the firm as a partner, and agreed to walk Hunter Biden through his new role in the world of high-finance.
The complaint Lotito filed said, “Given Hunter Biden’s inexperience in the securities industry,” it was agreed that Lotito would keep an office at the hedge fund’s New York headquarters, “in order to assist Biden in discharging his duties as president.”
The venture went down in flames, after which Lotito sued the Bidens for fraud. They countersued, and the two sides settled in 2008.
During the years 2006-2009, at the same time the failed hedge fund was active, Hunter Biden was appointed as vice chairman of Amtrak, the taxpayer subsidized rail line. Once again, Hunter Biden had absolutely no experience in the rail industry.
So, what were his qualifications? In a 2006 statement to the Senate during his confirmation, he said he was qualified to be on the Amtrak board because—get ready—“as a frequent commuter and Amtrak customer for over 30 7ears, I have literally logged thousands of miles on Amtrak.”
He seriously said that. We suppose it’s like staying at a Holiday Inn Express…suddenly you are an expert because you were a customer.
Ironically (or not), Amtrak has acted as a major supporter of Joe Biden, while donating to his senate and presidential campaigns, and even naming a train station after him in Wilmington.
In a little bit of quid pro quo, Biden has encouraged taxpayer subsidies for the government subsidized railroad during his time in Washington.
Hunter Biden also enriched himself using his father’s name through:
Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC- co-founded five months after Biden became vice president; three months after it was setup, secured $24 million in loans through a federal program called TALF, which was designed to help bail out banks and auto lenders hit by financial crisis; within months the group had secured $130 million from the program, with some of the cash funneled into an investment fund incorporated in the Cayman Islands (ding, ding, ding), which is often used as a shelter to evade taxes, according to SEC.
Yet another subsidiary spun off years later told investors that board adviser Hunter was politically connected, highlighting in their prospectus that he was the “son of Vice President Biden.
Eudora Global- yet another investment firm which Hunter Biden claimed to have set up; however, articles of incorporation show it was actually a major Biden donor, Jeffrey Cooper who put Biden on the board after he became vice president.
Cooper ironically ran one of the largest asbestos-litigation firms in the US, and convinced Biden to make it easier to file asbestos lawsuits by shooting down tort reform. While the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden blocked reform on asbestos litigation whenever such bills reached the Senate floor.
Cooper’s law firm directly lobbied Biden’s office to kill such bills and donated $200,000 to Biden’s campaigns over the years; during Biden’s failed 2007-2008 run for president, Simmons Cooper donated $53,000 to his campaign.
After Joe Biden became vice president, Hunter Biden landed yet another cushy job at a New York-based law firm, which had strong ties to the Clintons, giving him the title of “counsel.” The firm, Boies Schiller Flexner LLP brought Hunter Biden on board after the Bidens had hired the firm to defend Hunter against fraud charges filed in an investment venture. The case was dismissed.
Boies was also tied into Ukraine, with a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch who was being investigated and desperate to repair his reputation sending large payments to Boies to compensate Hunter Biden for unspecified work.
The oligarch, who ran Burisma Holdings paid Boies $283,000 right at the same time when Joe Biden was directed by Barack Obama to oversee U.S. energy policy in Ukraine. Boies Schiller donated over $50,000 to Biden’s campaigns, according to FEC filings.
Besides Burisma and Ukraine, one of the most glaring issues in which Hunter Biden was involved was with a company called BHR Partners.
Just after Biden was named to be the so-called “point man” on U.S.-China policy, Rosemont Seneca setup a joint venture with the Bank of China called BHR, which was worth over $1 billion. Ironically, Hunter Biden was named vice chairman and director of the new venture. How weird is that!
The new venture received an investment deal, the first of its kind, with the Chinese government right around the same time that Joe Biden was going to China to meet with communist leaders.
According to Secret Service records, Hunter Biden accompanied his father to China on Air Force Two and it was during that junket that Hunter Biden facilitated the new deal.
In fact, Hunter Biden arranged for hone of his Chinese partners to shake hands with his father, the vice president. BHR was registered only 12 days later, and the Chinese government in Beijing cleared the deal and issued a business license shortly thereafter.
According to Peter Schweizer of the Government Accountability Institute, “no one else had such an arrangement in China.”
When criticism mounted over what appeared to be a significant conflict of interest over the deal, Hunter Biden resigned from the board; however, he did not divest his 10 percent equity stake in the fund, which is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars.
Have you ever wondered by Joe Biden can afford four mansions on the salary of a government employee? Now you know.
Hunter Biden said in an interview that HE IS ABSOLUTELY CONFIDENT HE WILL BE EXONERATED BY HIS FATHER'S JUSTICE DEPARTMENT.
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