Image: Marc Nozell via Flickr.
Biden was enriching
more family members than just Hunter
According
to Schwiezer, Biden was fibbing when he announced last year, “I never talked
with my son or my brother or anyone else — even distant family — about their
business interests. Period.” The truth is that Biden’s business conversations
not only benefited Hunter, they also benefitted Biden’s son-in-law Howard, his
brothers James and Frank, and his sister Valerie. Loose lips enrich sibs.
James
Biden was a welcome friend in the Obama White House. “Sometimes, James’ White
House visits dovetailed with his overseas business dealings, and his commercial
opportunities flourished during his brother’s tenure as vice president.” For
example, just three weeks after Biden’s longtime friend Kevin Justice,
president of HillStone International, a subsidiary of a huge construction
management firm, visited the White House, HillStone announced that James Biden
was its new Executive Vice President.
No
one cared that Biden had no experience in construction management. What might
have mattered was that, six months later, the firm got a contract to build
100,000 homes in Iraq, plus a $22 million U.S. federal government contract to
manage a State Department project. An executive in the parent company later
told investors it helped to have the vice president’s brother as a partner.
The
book excerpt also tells how Hunter -- a man known for drugs, alcohol, taking up
with his brother’s widow, fathering a child on a stripper, dumping the stripper
and his child, and marrying another woman –made bank in Ukraine thanks to
his father’s connections. It’s a complicated, unsavory story, but the bottom
line is the same as for James: Hunter got an immensely profitable job for which
he was completely unqualified because Biden allowed Hunter to piggyback
off of Biden’s connections.
When
it came to his kids, Biden didn’t stop with Hunter. His daughter, Ashley,
married a doctor, Howard Krein. Howard and his siblings open StartUp Health, an
investment consultancy firm. In 2011, when the firm had just opened, two of the
firm’s executives were invited to meet with Obama and Biden. The next day, this
barely hatched entity hit the big time:
The following day the new company would be
featured at a large health care tech conference being run by the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and StartUp Health executives
became regular visitors to the White House, attending events in 2011, 2014 and
2015.
How did StartUp Health gain access to the highest
levels of power in Washington? There was nothing particularly unique about the
company, but for this:
For
years after, including his years in the White House, Biden made a point of
promoting the company.
James
also wasn’t the only one of his siblings Biden helped. In March 2009, Biden
went to Costa Rica. The last time a high-ranking American official went to
Costa Rica was in 1997 when Bill Clinton traveled there. Biden’s trip may not
have been a coincidence:
Joe Biden’s trip to Costa Rica came at a
fortuitous time for his brother Frank, who was busy working deals in the
country. Just months after Vice President Biden’s visit, in August, Costa Rica
News announced a new multilateral partnership “to reform Real Estate in Latin
America” between Frank Biden, a developer named Craig Williamson, and the
Guanacaste Country Club, a newly planned resort.
[snip]
As it happened, Joe Biden had been asked by
President Obama to act as the Administration’s point man in Latin America and
the Caribbean.
Frank’s vision for a country club in Costa Rica
received support from the highest levels of the Costa Rican government— despite
his lack of experience in building such developments. He met with the Costa
Rican ministers of education and energy and environment, as well as the
president of the country.
The
same amazing coincidences played out with Biden’s sister Valerie, to whom his
campaigns ended up paying $2.5 million in consulting fees in 2008 alone.
Considering
that the New York Post article is merely a short excerpt
from Peter Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption, readers can expect to
be exposed to a massive, but readable data dump, explaining how taxpayer funds
and political connections have been funding the lifestyles of the rich and
progressive.
NY Post: ‘Profiles in Corruption’ Reveals How the ‘Biden Five’ Made Millions
Off Joe Biden Connections
Spencer
Platt/Getty, HarperCollins
18 Jan 20202,346
1:47
Five family members of former Vice
President Joe Biden have scored “sweetheart deals” and “favorable access” thanks
to their connection to the 2020 Democrat White House candidate, reveals the
forthcoming investigative book Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of
Power by America’s Progressive Elite by five-time New York Times bestselling author
and Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer.
The Biden family’s apparent
self-enrichment involves no less than 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 declared, “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…
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 U.S. 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.
Report:
James Biden Secured $500,000 Loan from Healthcare Firm Under Federal
Investigation
Haraz N.
Ghanbari/AP Photo
10 Mar 2020123
6:12
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s younger brother James is being
accused of securing a big-money loan from a healthcare company now under
federal investigation and facing bankruptcy.
James, who has a
history of muddled financial dealings, reportedly used his political ties to
convince executives at Americore Health, a rural healthcare firm, to loan him
$650,000. The younger Biden, who worked for the company between 2017 and 2019,
got the personal loan after helping Americore secure an even bigger bridge loan
from a hedge fund run by one of his associates, Michael Lewitt. According to
court documents and former Americore executives, James Biden convinced the
firm’s leadership to sign off on both by promising he would be able to secure
larger investments from Middle Eastern contacts thanks to his family’s name.
“In 2017 and 2018, James Biden was embarking on a foray into
health care investing, telling potential partners, including at Americore, that
his last name could open doors and that Joe Biden was excited about the public
policy implications of their business models, according to court filings and
interviews with James’ former business contact,” Politico reported on Monday.
A former Americore executive, Tom Pritchard, told Politico that shortly
after James Biden received the $650,000 personal loan, his day-to-day role in
the firm decreased.
“Jim needed to lay
low because his brother was possibly running for president, and he didn’t need
any bad press,” Pritchard said.
Meanwhile, without
investment incoming, Americore struggled under already tight finances to make
its model for the acquisition of rural hospitals work. The cause would
eventually fail, with the company being forced to file bankruptcy in December
2019.
Americore’s poor
financial shape is only one side of the story. The firm is also under federal
investigation after a lawsuit filed in Tennessee in July 2019 alleged Americore
and its leadership of fraud.
Michael Frey and
his business partner, Dr. Mohannad Azzam, brought the suit claiming James Biden
and his associates promised and failed to line up investors for their rural
healthcare enterprise. Instead, the suit alleges, James Biden urged the two men
to borrow $10 million from a hedge fund manager involved in the deal and then
proceeded to pass their idea off as his own to a conglomerate of Turkish
investors.
“The lawsuit takes direct aim at Biden, painting him as a con
artist who uses his ties to his brother — now a Democratic candidate for
president — to lure his victims,” the Knoxville
News Sentinel reported.
According to
documents filed with the U.S. District Court, Frey and his wife developed a
business model to take over rural hospitals and retrofit them to not only offer
traditional hospital care, but also drug addiction and mental health treatment.
After incorporating the enterprise as Diverse Medical Management, they brought
on Azzam, “who contracted with nursing homes to provide medical care for
seniors.”
The business model
was lucrative enough that by 2017, Frey and Azzam were actively pitching it to
investors and hospitals across the country. One investor particularly taken
with the idea was Americore.
At the behest of Americore CEO Grant White, Frey and Azzam were urged to
pitch their business plan to rural hospitals in Kentucky. It was at one such
meeting where the two men met James Biden, who identified himself as a “principal”
at Americore.
Not long after
their initial encounter, James Biden introduced the men to Lewitt, a hedge fund
manager and well-known “credit strategist.” Around this time, Americore made
plans to buy Diverse Medical for the sum of $7 million.
Despite the deal,
Americore quickly fell behind on its scheduled payments to Frey and Azzam. It
was then that James Biden and Lewitt, as detailed in the lawsuit, hatched
a plan to oust White and sell Americore along with Diverse Medical to a third
company called the Platinum Group. Frey and Azzam appear to have been
uncomfortable with the turn the deal took, especially the notion of removing
White. The men, though, went along with the plan after being told a payout was
“imminent.”
“They repeatedly
assured (Frey) that investment capital originating from and flowing through
foreign entities was not only certain, but was imminent,” documents filed by
Frey and Azzam’s attorney state.
This is not the first time that James Biden’s business dealings
have raised eyebrows. As Breitbart News reported in January,
James Biden received more than $1.5 billion in government-backed contracts
during the Obama administration. The revelations were first extensively
detailed in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by
America’s Progressive Elite—a new book by Peter Schweizer, senior contributor at Breitbart
News and president of the Government Accountability Institute.
In 2010, fresh off
a disastrous attempt at running a Wall Street hedge fund, James Biden joined
HillStone International as executive vice president. The newly founded company
was run by Kevin Justice, a longtime family friend of the Bidens. Under
Justice’s leadership, HillStone International was setting out to pursue construction
and technology projects, especially those being funded by the U.S. government
in Iraq.
Hiring James, who
had neither experience in construction nor international development, seemed to
be a big part of the company’s strategy to secure such projects. When
announcing the hire, HillStone touted the political connections James had built
up through helping run his older brother’s political campaigns.
Six months after
James was hired, the company received a contract, estimated to be worth upwards
of $1.5 billion, to build more than 100,000 homes in Iraq. As a minority
partner in the firm, James would have been eligible to split more than $735
million in profits upon the contract’s completion.
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