Who benefits from the corruption that follows Joe Biden or just about any corrupt politician in Washington or places like Chicago?
The politicians themselves are often indirect beneficiaries when the benefits go to a family member, close friend, or associate to obscure the corrupt act. Essentially, it boils down to four groups of people: family, friends, donors, and machine patrons.
The methods used also often fall into specific categories. There are the sweetheart deals involving family members and friends. The family has long been the pathway that political figures use to route power and benefits for their own self-enrichment. Technically, it is not self-enrichment, but practically speaking, money flow to family increases the wealth of the family estate. International bribery standards are quite clear: money or deals given to a politician’s family or close friend in return for a favor is as much a bribe as if the money went straight to the politician. The same must be said for leveraging their position: the politician whose family is given deals is no different from the politician who receives those deals himself. Joe Biden has emerged as a king of the sweetheart deal, with no less than five family members benefiting from his largesse, favorable access, and powerful position for commercial gain. In Biden’s case, these deals include foreign partners and, in some cases, even U.S. taxpayer dollars.
Another method is income generation, whereby political power translates into a direct revenue stream for political figures or their family members. Elizabeth Warren benefited enormously from the government power she wielded early in her government career to the tune of millions of dollars. And her daughter benefits financially from her proximity to her mother as a powerful U.S. senator. Some of the politicians appear to have family cultures that feel entitled to use political status and power for their own benefit, and relish in the opportunities presented. Sherrod Brown has used his legislative authority to the benefit of his class-action attorney brother, pushing a strange health care agenda that dovetails with his brother’s litigation practice. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti’s family has benefited from his ability to approve major real estate projects.
Another powerful form of political corruption involves bending the law. Does it seem as if some people get away with everything? Political power can be wielded to create “unequal protection under the law.”
As we have seen the television-friendly portions of Joe Biden’s political career unfold. Other aspects involving his family’s complex and obscured international deals, leveraged on Joe’s political status and power, have rarely been explored. The Biden family partners are often foreign governments, where the deals occur in the dark corners of international finance like Kazakhstan, China, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Ukraine, and Russia. Some deals have even involved U.S. taxpayer money. The cast of characters includes sketchy companies, violent convicted felons, foreign oligarchs, and other people who typically expect favors in return. Joe’s public power positions Biden family members for highly lucrative deals they likely would not otherwise get. These deals also often occur with the appearance that Joe Biden has done favors for the partners who welcome such family members.
These are not a few disparate enterprises, but rather moneymaking ventures that appear to be part of a well-organized family business.
Joe Biden has insisted in absolute terms that he never discusses family members’ business activities. The Biden family’s apparent self-enrichment depends on Joe Biden’s political influence and involves no less than five family members: Joe’s son Hunter, daughter Ashley, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie.
When this subject came up in 2019, he declared, “I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else—even distant family—about their business interests. Period.” (Politico has since removed the article from publication – go figure. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/28/biden-brother-business-2020–1476815 As we will see, this is an impossibility. Biden’s political identity rests on his hardscrabble and humble roots, which create the impression that both he and his family are not interested in money. As one admiring newspaperman puts it: “Biden sweats humanity.” Still, he does not necessarily like pedestrian labels. “I am always labeled as the ‘middle class Joe,’” he groused in 2014. “In this town, that is not a compliment. It means you are not sophisticated.”
From his earliest foray into politics to the present day, Biden’s political life has been fused with his family. From the beginning, the Biden family, as one admiring biographer puts it, “formed the nucleus for Joe Biden’s political operations.” (See Curtis Wilkie, The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Most Powerful Trial Lawyer (New York: Crown, 2010), p. 195).
The notion of family was deeply embedded in the Biden psyche at an early age. “The single best thing [I learned from my father] is,” Joe’s son Hunter once said, “family comes first. Over everything. “This otherwise admirable character quality crosses the line into corruption when political position and vested power become the locomotive of the family money train. Love of family is not a legitimate excuse for the abuse of power.
His 1972 run for the U.S. Senate was pivotal. Little known, Joe was elected to the New Castle County Council just two years earlier.
That made him an unusual commodity. In a 1974 interview he described his situation in terms that he now probably regrets. “I’m like the token black or the token woman,” he explained on the PBS program The Advocates. “I was the token young person. I’m a 29-year-old oddball. The only reason I was able to raise the money is that I was able to have a national constituency to run for office, because I was 29.”
Biden was remarkably candid in that interview about raising money and his willingness to “prostitute” himself to do it. “You run the risk of deciding whether or not you’re going to prostitute yourself to give the answer you know they want to hear in order to get funded to run for that office,” he explained. “I went to the big guys for the money. I was ready to prostitute myself in the manner in which I talk about it, but what happened was they said, ‘Come back when you’re 40, son.’ ”
In 1988, when Joe was running for president, he looked to be a favorite. But his campaign was derailed by allegations that he had plagiarized a speech from British politician Neil Kinnock. With the campaign in crisis, his wife Jill, brothers Frank and James, sister Valerie, his parents, and his children all gathered around Joe. The choice to withdraw from the race was a family decision.
For the next three decades, Senator Joe Biden became a Washington fixture, accumulating a progressive voting record on a wide variety of issues. Other aspects of his voting record suggest the pull of his family’s commercial interests. Senator Biden pushed for the passage of a new bankruptcy law that put him out of step with most of his Democratic Party colleagues. He voted against a bill that would require credit card companies to provide better warnings about the perils of making only minimum monthly payments. He was only one of five Democrats to do so. During the same period (between 2001 and 2005), son Hunter was receiving consulting fees from the MBNA Corporation, a major Delaware bank and credit card company. While sitting on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Biden also worked hard on legislation to deal with asbestos-damage lawsuits. It just so happened that son Beau was working for a Wilmington, Delaware, law firm that was handling asbestos litigation cases.
In 2001, son Hunter jumped in with both feet when he became a lobbyist with the firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair LLP, with offices on Connecticut Avenue just blocks from the White House. Their founder, William Oldaker, also served as a legal advisor to Joe Biden. The boutique firm specialized in “appropriations” lobbying, which meant shaking money loose from the federal government for their clients. They represented lawyers, American Indians, as well as the health care industry. It was located in the same office was the National Group lobbying firm, also run by Oldaker, whose clients included the University of Delaware. Part of their job was submitting “targeted spending items called ‘earmarks’ to Biden’s office.” The arrangement seemed to work quite well until 2006, when the Senate passed an ethics bill requiring senators to verify in writing that they or their families would not benefit from spending items or earmarks that they were pushing. Hunter had to shift gears and leave the appropriations lobbying game.35
However, Hunter was not done with other types of lobbying.
An online gambling company run out of Gibraltar named PartyGaming was under federal scrutiny. The Department of Justice had issued subpoenas to more than a dozen banks working with the company. The company needed help in Washington and hired Hunter Biden to lobby on their behalf. It probably did not hurt that his father was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with oversight of the Department of Justice. In 2008, Hunter eventually dropped his lobbying clients when his dad was announced as Obama’s running mate. Months later, a cofounder of PartyGaming pleaded guilty to violating the Wire Act and agreed to pay a $300 million fine to the U.S. government.
Stay tuned for The Thirty-Year History of Joe Biden’s Corruption – Part II
Source – Profiles in Corruption by Peter Schweizer