According to bank records obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, President Joe Biden received a check for $200,000 from his brother James Biden on March 1, 2018 — the same day James Biden’s health care company, Americore, wired a loan of the same amount into the personal bank account of James and his wife Sara.
In January 2020, the FBI raided the home of Americore’s CEO Grant White and a rural hospital in Pennsylvania that the company was operating. After the company declared bankruptcy, a filing from a federal trustee accused White of “improperly siphon[ing] money from the Debtors for his personal benefit.” James Biden, who had business cards listing him as a “principal” at Americore, and two business partners promised to deliver as much as $30 million in investment money to the company that never materialized, according to White.
Further, a lawsuit alleging fraud against James Biden and his business partners, notes that James Biden heavily touted his brother’s political connections as a reason he could obtain money from foreign investors. According to the lawsuit from Tennessee businessman Michael Frey and his partner Dr. Mohannad Azzam, they took out loans to invest in Americore with the assurance that they would be paid back when Biden helped secure investments from Dogan Holding — one of Turkey’s largest conglomerates.
White also affirms that James Biden was trading on his brother’s political connections. “[Biden told me] there’s not a single door in the country that we can’t open. So if I wanted to meet, you know, the head of Google, it’s a phone call,” he told The Federalist in 2020. “He always represented himself as the fundraiser for his brother’s campaigns… he was the guy raising the money and so he knew everybody.”
Despite the fact that Americore was having cash flow issues, White told The Federalist Biden pushed the company to improperly divert $650,000 from the company to him in the form of personal loans:
Biden approached him in January of 2018 and told him his Florida vacation home had been damaged in Hurricane Irma a few months prior, and his insurance would not cover the repairs.
Biden owns a six-bedroom vacation home on Keewaydin Island near Naples, Florida. His brother vacationed there when he was vice president. Biden spent $2.5 million purchasing the house in 2013, a questionable expense considering he would later be slapped with a lien by the IRS for failing to pay $589,000 in 2013 federal taxes. (In 2016, Biden tried sell the house for $5.9 million – it eventually sold in 2018, after sustaining hurricane damage, for $1.35 million.)
In addition to the damage sustained by the vacation home, White says Biden was deeply concerned about paying back a personal loan that was due, which was secured by the vacation house. He was worried about losing his vacation home, so he approached White. “There were financial challenges there and I’m an investment banker, so I was trying to help him figure out how to solve his problems … I’m a problem solver and I considered him a friend,” White says.
It’s possible that the home loan James Biden sought to pay back was to his brother. However, sources close to Americore previously told The Federalist that the source of the personal loan James Biden sought to pay back was a notorious lawyer named Dickie Scruggs, who did jail time for a bribery charge. Scruggs is best known for his role in obtaining a $248 billion tobacco settlement on behalf of several states in 1998. According to the book The Fall of the House of Zeus, Scruggs retained the lobbying outfit that James Biden was running, The Lion Hall Group, to lobby in favor of legislation related to the settlement that was being considered in the Senate. Joe Biden supported the legislation, but it did not pass.
Regardless, James Biden has an extensive history of taking personal loans from friends and business associates. One notable $500,000 loan came from John Hynansky, a Ukrainian-American businessman and donor to Joe Biden’s campaigns. Hynansky’s loan was delivered “as Biden’s brother faced financial difficulties related to his acquisition of a multimillion-dollar vacation home,” according to Politico.
In the case of the $650,000 in personal loans Americore made to James Biden, they were never paid back before the company declared bankruptcy, resulting in the closure of a number of hospitals.
In a press release, House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., is now demanding answers from President Biden about the money he received from his brother and promising more information:
Some immediate questions President Biden must answer for the American people:
Does he have documents proving he lent such a large sum of money to his brother and what were the terms of such financial arrangement?
Did he have similar financial arrangements with other family members that led them to make similar large payments to him?
Did he know that the same day James Biden wrote him a check for $200,000, James Biden had just received a loan for the exact same amount from business dealings with a company that was in financial distress and failing?
The House Oversight Committee will soon announce our next investigative actions and continue to follow the money.
The bank records don’t end here.
There is more to come.
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