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
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.
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.