Democratic presidential hopeful former Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday on ABC’s “The View” that his son Hunter Biden had “done nothing but good things his whole life.”
Co-host Joy Behar said, “People wanted to see you really get mad when people started lying about Hunter and saying things about Hunter. I don’t know that you got mad enough.”
Biden said, “Well, you know I would like to be able to be back in high school and just have he and I in a room.”
Behar said, “Of course, I know.”
Biden continued, “But all kidding aside, here’s the deal. Look, it is hurtful, particularly when guys like Lindsey Graham, who’s a friend of mine, do these things.”
Behar asked, “He’s still a friend?”
Biden said, “Look, presidents can’t —I plan on being president. Presidents can’t hold grudges. You got to heal. You got to heal the country, and I just don’t want to let myself get into the mood of —like, for example, people say, why don’t I attack his kids, they’re making millions?”
Behar said, “No, no.”
Jill Biden said, “You got to be above it.”
Biden continued, “That’s not how we were raised. And look, nobody has said he’s done anything wrong. This is a guy who has done nothing but good things his whole life, my son. He ran a food program WFP USA, a whole range of things. But look, it’s what it is. We knew it was going to be ugly.”
Peter
Schweizer Unveils the Layers of Corruption Behind the Biden Family
Volume 90%
31 Jan 202023
8:59
Despite former Vice President Joe
Biden’s image of being a fighter for the working class, he has actually engaged
in behavior that benefitted himself and his family members to the tune of
millions of dollars in shady business deals, according to an interview with
Government Accountability Institute (GAI) president and Breitbart News senior
contributor Peter Schweizer, author of the new book Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive
Elite .
Schweizer,
in an interview on Wednesday with SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow,
said that dichotomy is represented by Biden being known for riding Amtrak home
every day but also by his habit of holding up the train whenever he was running
late.
“Yeah,
Joe does ride the train all the time, but if Joe’s running late, Joe calls
Amtrak, and they hold the entire train until Joe shows up, which is great for
Joe [but] the other commuters are probably going, ‘What the heck’s going on?
Why is the train not moving?'” Schweizer said. “So that to me represents
the dichotomy between the image we have of Joe, which is Amtrak Joe, and the
reality of how he abuses that power.”
Schweizer
discussed several examples of Biden’s abuses of power he laid out in his book.
He
said after Biden became vice president and the point person on China, his
son Hunter Biden began to benefit from deals with the Chinese government. He
said:
You
have this situation where Joe Biden becomes vice president of the United
States. He is the point person on China, he’s somewhat of an old hand on China
because he’s on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee all those years,
traveled to China. He becomes vice president and then suddenly, sort of out of
the blue, his son Hunter gets these deals courtesy of the Chinese government.
As
Schweizer detailed in a previous book, Secret
Empires , Hunter Biden in 2012 inked a $1.5 billion deal
with a subsidiary of the state-owned Bank of China to create a private equity
fund called Bohai Harvest RST — only 12 days after he visited China with
his father aboard Air Force Two.
Schweizer
said during Wednesday’s interview:
The
key on all this stuff you have to look at, I think with corruption, is timing.
And you mentioned Ukraine. The timing is clear: February of 2014, Putin moves
into Crimea, that creates this whole crisis. In March of 2014, Joe is point
person on Ukraine policy. Within three weeks, Ukrainians suddenly decide, “Hey
Hunter Biden is the guy, the expert, we want to join this company. And yeah, we
need to pay him a million dollars a year.” You look at that and think, “This is
absurd” … It’s not like he was advising Ukraine in 2005. Same thing with China.
They
do the pivot to China in 2011, 2012. Joe goes over there on one of his first
significant trips, and what does he do? His son comes with him, and ten days
after the trip, the son suddenly announces this billon-and-a-half-dollar
private equity deal. It’s clear, it’s crystal clear what’s going on.
Schweizer
also discussed how Hunter Biden, while his father was vice president, set up a
financial entity known as the Burnham Financial Group, along with business
partner Devon Archer and then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson
Christopher Heinz, that benefitted from the Bidens’ political clout.
Schweizer
said:
The
Burnham Financial Group, when you go through — there was a court trial, so we
got access to some of the corporate records — again, you’ve got deals with
Kazakh officials, with a guy named [Kenes] Rakishev, who’s this Kazakh
oligarch. You’ve got this reference in corporate documents to this $200 million
deal that they have with Elena Baturina.
Now, Elena
Baturina is the ex-wife of the mayor of Moscow, and if you spend five minutes
on Google with Elena Baturina, you realize that law enforcement across the
western world believes she’s at the center point of Russian organized crime.
Well,
they’re saying in corporate documents we have a $200 million deal with this
individual. This is all going on — doesn’t happen before he is vice president.
It’s not really happening since he’s been vice president. It’s happening in
this one island of eight years.
Schweizer
said the Burnham Financial Group also set up a deal with the nation’s poorest
Native American Indian tribe, the Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota:
“That’s an attempt to basically rip off these Indian tribes, and by the
way, let’s rip off some labor union pension funds as well.”
Schweizer
said although Archer is more involved then Biden in the scheme, the Bidens’
names “came up all the time” when meeting with pension fund officials. Joe
Biden was known as a being “the big labor union guy,” Schweizer said.
The
former vice president’s sister also benefitted from his connections, Schweizer
said.
He
said in June 2011, Biden brought founders of a start-up health care investment
firm called StartUp Health into the White House to meet with President Obama,
and they took a picture they later used for their website. The start-up was featured
the next day at a federal data conference on health care despite it being a new
company, Schweizer said.
Schweizer
said over the next five years, through 2016, the vice president showed up at
the company’s conferences and closed-door events for investors and partners. He
said:
Well,
the factor that I haven’t mentioned is that one of the three
principals involved with this company is married to his daughter and I
think explains what’s going on here. So how you do all of that and hold true to
your statement that you’ve never had a conversation with a family member about
business matters is patently absurd.
Lastly,
Schweizer discussed how the former vice president’s brother, Frank Biden, has
benefitted from his family’s connections.
Schweizer
said in 2000, Frank Biden rented a Jaguar, which he let another man drive with
three girls in the back. He continued:
The
guy that’s driving it is going 70 in a 35. They hit this man who’s a
single father who has two teenage daughters … He hits the car, goes over the
top of the car, and of course dies. The three girls in the back of the car say
that Frank — once this happened — told the guy driving, “Keep driving, keep
driving.”
So
the estate for the girls that have survived … sues Frank Biden. The driver, of course,
is sent to jail for reckless driving. They go after Frank with a civil suit.
Frank doesn’t show up to court, doesn’t really respond to the allegations, so
the court says, you know, “you’re liable for $250,000.” The court’s now trying
to collect this debt.
Schweizer
said the daughters’ family hired a private investigator to find Frank
Biden. He said after he is found living in Delaware with Joe Biden, the
daughters wrote Joe Biden, telling him what happened and that his brother
was liable.
Schweizer
said the letter Joe Biden wrote back to them “is so cold and so calculating,
particularly, by the way, for a man — Joe Biden — who lost his wife and his
daughter in a car accident as well.” Schweizer said:
He
says basically, “Well, you know Frank doesn’t have the money. I’m certainly not
liable, and I just wish you well.” That’s basically what he says in this
letter. And so that sort of sets up the entirety, in my mind, for a lot of what
Frank is doing, which is Frank is doing overseas deals in places like Costa
Rica and Jamaica because … that’s beyond the reach of the court. That debt has
now ballooned to like nine hundred thousand dollars.
Schweizer
said in the meantime, Frank Biden set up a company to make money off of
tax-funded charter schools with questionable characters.
“He
realizes is that there’s not much money to be made in running charter
schools. The money is to be made in the real estate of charter schools. So
basically he gets involved with investors, they buy properties, and then they
lease these to charter schools. And charter schools, using taxpayer money, are
essentially paying off their leases,” Schweizer said.
He
said:
Some
of the people [that] finance these deals, are the most sketchy of
characters. There’s a guy that has a criminal record, a violent
criminal record from the past, was widely believed in southern Florida for
being involved in the drug trade. His brother actually was found in a shallow
grave because of a major drug deal gone bad, and yet Frank Biden did major
financial real estate transactions and deals with these guys and helped them
make money through this charter school grift.
Marlow
concluded: “The main takeaway I took from Biden is that Joe Biden is either too
weak to stand up to his family or he is in on it, and both are terrible,
especially if he’s running for president. It’s one or the other.”
Volume 90%
Revealed:
Pro-Biden Super PAC Bankrolled by Real Estate, Wall Street, Big Oil
KEVIN
WINTER/GETTY IMAGES
31 Jan 202016
3:39
A Super
PAC working to elect former Vice President Joe Biden is being bankrolled by a
bevy of real estate, financial, and oil interests.
Unite
the Country, which is run by a lobbyist and longtime Biden confidant, disclosed
its donors on Friday in filings made public with the
Federal Election Commission (FEC). Between launching at the end of October and
the December 31 filing deadline, the group raised more than $3.7 million
in support of Biden’s candidacy. Although the money poured in from a number of
high-dollar donors, some of Unite the Country’s largest contributors were
individuals tied to real estate, Wall Street, and the fossil fuels industry.
The
Super PAC’s most prolific donor by far was George Marcus, the leader of one of
America’s largest commercial property brokerage firms. Marcus has been a
longtime backer of the former vice president, donating to his campaign and
even hosting a ritzy fundraiser on his
behalf in San Francisco, California. After having maxed out to Biden’s official
campaign, the billionaire real estate magnate found a new avenue with which to
support Biden. In total, Marcus has donated one million to Unite the Country
throughout the end of December 2019. It remains unclear, though, if he donated
more since the end of 2019. FEC reports for the first month of 2020 will not be
released until mid-February.
Marcus was not the only big name
from the real estate world to underwrite Unite the Country’s efforts. Alan
Leventhal, the chairman of the Massachusetts-based private real estate behemoth
Beacon Capital, is also a top donor. At the end of December, he contributed
$250,000 in support of the former vice president’s candidacy.
Unite the Country found
similarly strong support on Wall Street. Another important donor
is Roger Altman, a longtime investment banker and former deputy secretary
of the treasury in the Clinton administration. Altman, who has donated $200,000
to the group, was forced to resign his government post in 1994 over the
Whitewater controversy.
Since then, Altman has reinvented
himself in high-finance, even helping shepherd General Motors through its
bankruptcy in 2009. Altman most recently served as political adviser to
the failed presidential campaigns of former Secretaries of State John
Kerry and Hillary Clinton in 2004 and 2008, respectively. Now, he seems to be
all in for Biden.
Other high-powered Wall Street
figures, including Bernard Schwartz and Jonathan Gray, contributed to the Super
PAC too. Scwartz, who leads BLS Investments, contributed $100,000 to Unite the
Country. Likewise, Gray who serves as the president the Blackstone Group—a
private equity giant, gave $50,000. Three senior members of Blackstone’s
leadership team contributed a further $50,000 each.
Unite the Country is also
bankrolled, in part, by oil interests. Richard Slifka, the chief executive
of Global Petroleum Corp., contributed $50,000 to the Super PAC at the end of
December. Global Petroleum is a commodity trading company specializing in crude
oil and gasoline.
The
money from Slifka and others has allowed Unite the Country to spend more than $4.3 million in
hopes of creating a last minute surge behind the former vice president ahead of
the Iowa Caucuses.
Profile
in Corruption outlines how
Biden’s children and other members of his family did just that while he was in
political office.
Joe
Biden Helped Launch Business for Son-in-Law from the Oval Office, Repeatedly
Briefed Investors Privately
Former Vice President Joe Biden went
to great lengths to boost his son-in-law’s health care company while in the
White House, briefing investors on the firm’s merits and even arranging access
to the Oval Office. The bombshell revelations are detailed in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive
Elite — a new book by Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at
Breitbart News and the president of the Government Accountability Institute.
In June 2011, Biden arranged a
private meeting for two StartUp Health executives with then-President Barack
Obama in the Oval Office. At the time of the meeting, the company had been
around for only a few weeks. It had yet to finalize its business plan, let
alone develop a website.
The meeting was all the more surprising
since StartUp Health was not proposing any new or radical ideas for health
care, at least not to the degree of warranting a meeting with the nation’s
commander-in-chief.
“Their status as a health care
incubator was hardly unique,” Schweizer writes in Profiles in Corruption . “In
fact, there were thirty-one similar companies operating in the state of
California alone, and another eleven in the state of New York.”
As Schweizer outlines, the only
significant factor that set StartUp Health apart from others in its field was
that its chief medical officer, Howard Krein, was engaged to Biden’s daughter,
Ashley. Krein, a head and neck doctor by training, seemed to have become an
integral part of Biden’s inner-circle even before he officially wed into the family in June
2012.
One day after StartUp Health’s
executives met with Obama in the Oval Office, the company got a bigger boost
from the administration when it was featured at a health care tech conference
put on by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). How the company
managed to score HHS attention, while still in the stages of infancy, remains
unclear, but it is likely Biden played a role.
Regardless, the back-to-back events
gave StartUp Health a launch trajectory unavailable to other companies in the
health care field, let alone other industries. Biden’s influence ensured that
StartUp Health set out with “the winds to our backs,” as one of the company’s
co-founders succinctly put it.
The former vice president’s efforts
on his son-in-law’s behalf were not just confined to the company’s launch. As Profiles in Corruption details,
Biden went out of his way to ensure StartUp Health executives were given
unparalleled access to the White House during the Obama presidency. The
company’s leadership, which mostly consisted of Krein’s family and friends,
frequently met with administration officials not only in private but also in
public.
“According to 2011 White House
visitors’ logs, Howard Krein attended the China State Dinner, a White House
Staff barbecue, and President Obama’s Motown event,” Schweizer writes. “His
brother, Steven, had half a dozen other meetings with White House officials.”
Biden’s efforts on behalf of the
company expansively increased during his final year in office, both
internationally and at home.
First, the vice president took Krein
with him on Air Force Two to a conference on regenerative health hosted by Pope
Francis at the Vatican in April 2016.
“Conference attendees included a
who’s who of scientific researchers in medicine from around the world,”
Schweizer notes.
Then in May, Krein was tasked with
introducing his father-in-law at a major health industry data conference hosted
by the Obama administration. The opportunity provided free publicity to the
company as it planned to expand its portfolio.
In October 2016, Biden appeared
alongside StartUp Health’s CEO at the Cleveland Clinic’s Medical Innovation
Summit. During his remarks, Biden praised StartUp Health as an innovator in the
health care market and claimed companies like it would be essential to winning the battle
against cancer.
Apart from arranging access and
touting the company in public, Biden also took steps in the waning days of the
Obama administration to boost investment in StartUp Health. In January 2017,
Biden made one of his final appearances as vice president at a festival hosted
by the company in San Francisco, California. At the event, Biden lauded StartUp
Health’s success to 250 attendees, including members and prospective donors.
Ironically, at the same time he was
working to promote his son-in-law’s business, Biden was also claiming his
children had chosen careers unlikely to make them rich.
“I wish my kids would become
wealthy,” Biden told the International
Association of Fire Fighters in July 2012 while lambasting the economic
policies of then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Profile in Corruption outlines how Biden’s children and other members of his
family did just that while he was in political office.
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