Thursday, March 12, 2020

JOE BIDEN UNDER DEMENTIA SAYS TRUMP IS A 'COLOSSAL' FAILURE - BUT WHO IN AMERICAN REMEMBERS ANYTHING BIDEN DID BUT SUCK OFF BRIBES?



Coronavirus: Joe Biden Blasts Trump Admin for ‘Colossal’ Failure, Demands Millions of Tests

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks about the coronavirus Thursday, March 12, 2020, in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
AP Photo/Matt Rourke
3:03

Former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday said the Trump administration’s coronavirus response has been a “colossal” failure.
“The administration’s failure on testing is colossal. And it’s a failure of planning, leadership and execution,” Biden said at a press conference addressing the deadly outbreak. “By next week, the number of tests should be in the millions, not the thousands.”
Biden said that the deadly illness revealed “severe shortcomings” of the Trump administration and accused the president of stoking fears nationwide. He also suggested that the president was racist in calling the illness a “foreign virus,” despite the fact that it originated from Wuhan, China.

Joe Biden: “We have to get to work immediately to dig ourselves out of this hole. And that’s why today, I am releasing a plan to combat and overcome the coronavirus” https://cbsn.ws/38QOQ8p 

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“Neither should we panic or fallback on xenophobia,” he stated. “Labeling COVID-19 a ‘foreign virus’ does not displace accountability for the misjudgments that have been taken thus far by the Trump administration. Let me be crystal clear: the coronavirus does not have a political affiliation.”
Biden’s speech came one day after his campaign unveiled that it plans to create a “Public Health Advisory Committee” to provide guidance on how to combat the virus. The Democrat frontrunner is also shifting to  “virtual” campaign rally events in Florida and Illinois over fears stemming from the outbreak. Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) both canceled their Tuesday evening rallies in Cleveland, Ohio, due to the outbreak.
President Trump delivered an Oval Office address to the nation about his administration’s efforts to combat the spread of the coronavirus. The president announced that the United States would bar travel from European countries for 30 days beginning at midnight on Friday. 
“After consulting with our top government health professionals, I have decided to take several strong but necessary actions to protect the health and wellbeing of all Americans,” he stated. “These prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo but various other things as we get approval. Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing.”
Trump said he is also instructing the Small Business Administration to provide low-interest loans to small businesses affected by the coronavirus and asking Congress to increase funding for this program by $50 million and provide Americans with immediate payroll tax relief.
The briefing came after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced 31 Americans have died from the COVID-19 outbreak and more than 1,000 have been sickened.
Trump warned that the highest risk remains among the elderly population with underlying health conditions and strongly advised nursing homes for the elderly to suspend all medically unnecessary visits and encouraged older people to avoid unnecessary travel.
“Smart action today will prevent the spread of the virus tomorrow,” Trump said.
The UPI contributed to this report. 

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.


Peter Schweizer Unveils the Layers of Corruption Behind the Biden Family

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 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.”
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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.

Biden was enriching more family members than just Hunter

 

On January 21, Peter Schweizer’s newest book, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, will be released. It should sell well given that pre-sales have already put it at #14 on the Amazon charts. As a preview of coming attractions, the New York Post published an extract from the book detailing “How five members of Joe Biden’s family got rich through his connections.”
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:
The chief medical officer of StartUp Health, Howard Krein, is married to Joe Biden’s youngest daughter, Ashley.
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 New York Post reports:
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.
Read the rest here.


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 Elitea 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.