With less than one week before the Iowa caucuses, the establishment media is zeroing in on former Vice President Joe Biden and the culture of corruption that has permeated his immediate family for decades.
On Tuesday, Politico published an in-depth exposé on the financial ties between the former vice president’s younger brother, James, and a high-powered Washington, D.C., lobbyist. According to Politico, James and his wife purchased an acre of land in the U.S. Virgin Islands for $150,000 in May 2005. A year later, James resold a third of that acre to Scott Green, a national security lobbyist who previously served as a Senate staffer for Joe Biden. Green paid $150,000 for the land, even though the tax assessed value was only $38,000.
“In effect, James and [his wife] had gotten their money back while keeping most of the land—recouping their investment in just 12 months,” the outlet reported.
Any money that Green may have lost through the deal was offset when Joe Biden became vice president. In 2010, as Politico notes, Green and members of the lobbying firm he founded, the Lafayette Group, were frequent visitors at the Obama-Biden White House.
That year, Green’s ties to the Biden clan seemed to be especially beneficial. On April 11, 2010, the Lafayette Group was awarded two taxpayer-funded contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The contracts, worth a total of $5.8 million, were for support services geared toward developing FEMA’s “communications strategies.”
It remains unclear what involvement Joe Biden had, if any, in the awarding of the contract to the Lafayette Group. What is clear, though, is that three days after Green’s firm received the contracts, he gave James Biden and his wife a $133,300 mortgage on their property in the Virgin Islands.
Politico’s exposé comes after Breitbart News reported last week on a series of revelations from Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite. The book, authored by Peter Schweizer, senior contributor at Breitbart News and president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), offers a detailed account of the ways in which members of the Biden family have benefited from their proximity to power.
In particular, as Schweizer notes, James Biden may have benefited more than most. In 2010, fresh off a disastrous attempt at running a Wall Street hedge fund, James joined HillStone International as executive vice president. The newly founded company 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 in international development, seemed to be a big part of the company’s strategy to secure such projects. The strategy, as Profiles in Corruption notes, succeeded.
Six months after James was hired, HillStone 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.
Other members of the Biden family did just as well. Joe Biden’s other brother, Frank, benefited from $54 million in taxpayer-backed loans to Caribbean nations heavily involved in real estate and solar power projects he was pursuing in the region. The loans to Frank’s connected projects came through even though he lacked a background in solar energy or international real estate development.
Similarly, the former vice president’s sister, Valerie, received millions in fees during the 2008 election. Valerie, who served as the campaign manager for her brother’s failed presidential campaign that year, paid her own consulting firm, Joe Slade White & Company, $2.5 million for its services.
Schweizer’s book also details the shadowy entities that Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s youngest son partnered with, and how, at times, those investments benefited from government programs run by his father’s advisers.
The revelations within the book have been so explosive that even the mainstream media has been forced to take notice. Last week, an opinion piece published by The New York Times begrudgingly admitted that Schweizer’s book “provides building blocks for scandals involving a number of 2020 Democratic hopefuls.”
Since the Times published the piece, a number of other mainstream outlets have begun digging deeper into the Bidens. Over the weekend, a sighting of Hunter Biden exiting his $129,000 Porsche, with pregnant wife in tow, at the Waldorf Astoria in Los Angles, California, was reported by both outlets on the left and the right. Likewise, new revelations of Hunter’s ongoing paternity suit in Arkansas were covered by CNN and other members of the mainstream media.
The increased publicity seems to be having an impact on the former vice president and his campaign, especially so close to Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus on February 3. On Monday, the campaign’s rapid response director lashed out at Breitbart News after members of President Donald Trump’s legal team delivered a compelling argument at the Senate impeachment trial regarding the Bidens’ ties to Ukraine.
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