In a poll conducted last week for Just The News by Scott Rasmussen, 2,200 registered voters were asked “How likely is it that Joe Biden used his official position as Vice President to financially benefit his family and friends?” More than half said it was either “very likely” or “somewhat likely,” while just 29 percent said it was either “not very likely,” or “not at all likely.”
Among Republicans, 81 percent said it was likely, while Democrats denied reality, with two-thirds claiming it was unlikely. Among Independents — a key bloc of voters Trump needs to win reelection in November — half said it was likely that Biden enriched himself and his family during his stint as Barack Obama’s vice resident.
Most voters are likely to have a recollection of Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where Biden’s son got paid handsomely for sitting on the board of an energy company despite his knowing little or nothing about energy.
Few, however, have dug into the details. Fewer still know that the financial enrichment of presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden reaches far wider and deeper than just his son Hunter.
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Peter Schweizer has done that for those interested in just how far and how deep Biden and family have immersed themselves in efforts to take advantage financially of Biden’s position as vice president. His book Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite contains all one needs to know about how wide and deep that corruption goes in the Biden family.
Consider Joe Biden’s younger brother, James. He has been “an integral part of the family’s political machine” since 1972, according to Schweizer. While Biden was VP, James would often be invited to White House affairs and dinners, where he mixed it up with top people of international business firms, allowing him to make lucrative deals with them. As Schweizer wrote,
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.
That occurred just as HillStone was completing a $35 billion project to build 100,000 homes in Iraq. As David Richter, son of Hill International’s founder, expressed it at the time, it really helped to have “the brother of the vice president as partner” during the deal making.
Once completed, the deal was expected to generate $1.5 billion in revenues for the company, and profits of $735 million to be shared with a group of minority partners, one of whom was James Biden.
The deal fell through, but other contracts to rebuild Iraq as well as contracts in Puerto Rico and Mozambigue were completed, including a six-year contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, all with James on board.
Hunter Biden’s public involvement with Burisma was just the tip of the iceberg, according to Schweizer:
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.
When Archer was arrested and charged with “orchestrating a scheme to defraud investors and a Native American tribal entity [out of] tens of millions of dollars,” Hunter was not charged. But, wrote Schweizer, “his fingerprints were all over [it].” Schweizer added, ”Transcripts from Archer’s trial [revealed] 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 [while] alleviating investors’ concerns.”
Less than a month after launching an investment consultancy focusing on healthcare called StartUp Health, two of StartUp’s top executives were invited to the White House to meet with President Obama and Vice President Biden. The very next day, the company was featured at a large healthcare conference being sponsored and run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
How did that happen? Wrote Schweizer, “The chief medical officer of Startup Health, Howard Krein, [just happened to be] married to Joe Biden’s youngest daughter, Ashley.”
For the rest of his time in the White House, Biden continued to support StartUp Health by promoting the company with various personal public appearances, including a surprise visit to its StartUp Health Festival in San Francisco in January 2017.
And then there’s Joe Biden’s brother Frank. Just months after the vice president went to Costa Rica to call on the country’s president, Oscar Arias, Costa Rica News announced a new multilateral partnership “to reform Real Estate in Latin America,” with one of the partners being Frank Biden. The project involves building thousands of homes and a world-class golf course, all with the help of the Costa Rican government. What caught Schweizer’s attention was Frank’s “lack of experience in building such developments.”
That wasn’t a deterrent, however. With Joe Biden’s help, brother Frank’s firm, Sun Fund Americas, announced that it was “engaged in projects and is in negotiations with governments of other countries in the [Caribbean] region for both its Solar and Waste to Energy development services.”
At least one of those “projects” panned out, thanks to help from the Obama White House. After providing a $47.5 million loan to help build a 20-megawatt facility in Jamaica, Frank’s company announced plans to build it.
And let’s not forget Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie. She has collected millions in fees for running all of his Senate campaigns, as well as his failed runs for the presidency in 1988 and 2008. Two and half million dollars in fees were collected by Valerie’s two-person firm during Biden’s 2008 run alone.
It’s no wonder, then, that the registered voters polled by Rasmussen are persuaded that Joe Biden made maximum use of his time while Vice President enriching members of his family and friends.
Image: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, writing primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
