Remember When Biden's Brother Said They Had 747s Full of Cash Ready to Invest in Joe?
The Boeing 747 is the most iconic plane history of commercial aviation — which, in case you’ve forgotten over these past few months, is the process by which planes transport human passengers from one city to another. Occasionally, you can even go to another country — and back in the day all you needed was a customs declaration form and a passport stamp and you were free to roam to your heart’s desire.
Entering service in 1969 with Pan Am and Trans World Airlines (remember those?), the 747 was distinguished by its sheer size. It’s instantly recognizable by the hump at the very front of the plane, making it look almost like an upside-down pregnant guppy.
The superannuated jet is mostly out of commercial service right now, having found a new life as a converted cargo plane. According to James Biden, the brother of the Democratic nominee for president, it’s also a convenient way to get money to Joe Biden when giving it to him directly would violate campaign finance law.
Here’s why the plane is important: Joe Biden is, if you listen to his rhetoric, a middle-class guy who somehow found himself as vice president. If some reporter or pundit were to dub him “Average Joe,” he’d probably take it as a compliment. He’d put it on a T-shirt — along with, “Will you shut up, man?” — and make sure the media took a picture of it as he ate a hot dog with some assembly line workers.
I don’t labor under the misapprehension that a politician’s “personality” is anything more than a creation of talented PR hacks. Even with that, however, Joe Biden is about as middle class as I am a member of the House of Lannister. After all, this was a man who used to be derisively referred to as the “Senator from MBNA” because of his questionable (and profitable) links to many of the banking giants that call Delaware home.
It goes a bit beyond that, though — as reporter Ben Schreckinger explored in a 2019 piece for Politico titled “Biden, Inc.”
In 2006, the piece explains, several members of Biden family — including Joe and his brother James — purchased a hedge fund called Paradigm Global Advisors and fired the company’s president.
An anonymous executive described what happened next.
“Don’t worry about investors,” James Biden told the firm’s executives, laying out his vision for the investment firm. “We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”
“We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” he added, saying that it was a good way for what Schreckinger described as “rich foreigners” to curry influence with Joe Biden; non-citizens are prohibited from donating to U.S. campaigns
The Politico account doesn’t place then-Sen. Joe Biden in the room, but his sons Beau and Hunter were.
The now-deceased Beau Biden, who was then in the process of running for Delaware’s attorney general, “turned bright red,” according to Politico.
“This can never leave this room, and if you ever say it again, I will have nothing to do with this,” Beau told his uncle.
“A spokesman for James and Hunter Biden said no such episode ever occurred. Beau Biden died in 2015, at 46,” Schreckinger wrote
“But the recollection of an effort to cash in on Joe’s political ties is consistent with other accounts provided by other former executives at the fund.”
If the incident did occur as Politico reported, it was just before Joe Biden took over the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and started his second, unsuccessful campaign for the presidency. Both were developments that would be sure to catch the eye of wealthy foreigners looking for a friend in Washington.
The report goes on to detail blatant conflicts of interest, although Joe Biden seems to have been placed in a position of plausible deniability.
Take, for instance, labor unions. Biden, like most Democratic politicians, has strong relationships with unions — and James and Hunter Biden were purportedly willing to capitalize on that.
“I was told because of [Joe Biden’s] relationships with the unions that they felt as though it would be favorably looked upon to invest in the fund as long as it was a good fund,” Charles Provini, who was briefly the president of Paradigm, told Schreckinger.
Those investments never materialized, despite the fact that court documents show James Biden planned to solicit investment money from unions.
Neither Joe nor Beau Biden were directly involved in Paradigm, given that both had political careers. As for James and Hunter Biden, that was a different story.
“In James and Hunter’s five-year tenure, Paradigm became associated with a number of alleged and confirmed frauds … while seeking to draw on their powerful relative’s political allies for financing,” Schreckinger wrote.
“The pattern of dubious associations and possible conflicts of interest would continue later with Hunter’s foreign dealings, which led him to a lucrative appointment to the board of a Ukrainian oil company and to deals with firms connected to the Chinese state. But it started far earlier.”
The conflicts of interest are too numerous to mention here. For a taster: Hunter Biden was a lobbyist for music-sharing service Napster; during that time, Joe Biden sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was examining file sharing. Hunter also worked at the aforementioned MBNA — now a part of Bank of America — at about the same time his father was aggressively pushing bankruptcy reform that would have made it harder to discharge credit card debt.
Regardless of whether Biden would have needed much prodding to support such a measure — Delaware’s banking laws mean that the state is to financial institutions what Silicon Valley is to Big Tech — the situation looked pretty rank.
As for James, he managed to find himself in a few scrapes, too.
“In the 1990s, a group of Mississippi trial lawyers enlisted James to further its interests in Washington as it sought congressional support for a tobacco megasettlement,” Schreckinger wrote.
“A decade later, those Mississippi contacts supported Joe’s presidential bid — hosting a fundraiser for him and accepting an invitation to accompany Joe to a high-profile Washington dinner — while they simultaneously prepared to launch a lobbying firm with James and his wife, Sara. Plans for the firm fizzled when the Mississippians were arrested, then jailed, for an unrelated bribery scheme.”
According to Schreckinger, Richard Painter — who served as chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House but is now a Democrat with a disastrous run for Senate in his past — thinks the arrangements are troublesome.
“Joe Biden needs to recognize it’s a problem,” Painter said.
“You can’t control your brothers. You can’t control your grown son. But you can put some firewalls in place in your own office.”
One of those firewalls is telling your relatives not to profit off of your name — but this feels a bit too late, given Hunter Biden’s crowning achievement in life is managing to make his last name a career.
None of this is novel information. And yet, the mainstream media is focused on the Trump kids, not Joe Biden’s morally challenged relatives, many of whom seem desperately eager to leverage their last name for whatever it’s worth.
The likelihood that stops in the White House, particularly when it comes to Hunter, appears non-existent.
They may only have access to one 747 if that wretched outcome comes to pass, but that 747 is inarguably the world’s most famous one and it can make them all the money they want: Air Force One.
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