Long before Hunter Biden ever considered joining a Ukrainian energy company named Burisma, Joe Biden and his family used his power and position to leverage business deals with businesses seeking his influence, according to a new book. Joe Biden personally benefited from his political influence in a series of fortuitous real estate landfalls, even as virtually every member of the Biden family claimed its own piece of the pie, writes New York Post columnist Miranda Devine in her new book, Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide.
“While Joe Biden waged war on white privilege from the White House, his own family was the living embodiment of the worst of it,” writes Devine. “Joe has always made sure the Bidens lived a life of unearned privilege and entitlement under his beneficent patronage,” she continues in the book, which hits store shelves on Tuesday. “Like members of a hereditary aristocracy, the Bidens would have access to the best America can give, the most prestigious educational institutions, internships, clerkships, scholarships, directorships, and government sinecures.”
Decades ago, the president decided Hunter Biden would act as the family’s cash cow Devine says. “Hunter, who would have preferred to be an artist or a writer, was assigned the role of paying the bills for the rest of the family through lucrative grace-and-favor jobs and sweetheart deals facilitated by Joe’s network of connections in Delaware and, later, throughout the world,” she writes.
In addition to records from his missing laptop showing that Hunter held 10% of a Chinese business deal for “the big guy,” Devine quotes an email Hunter wrote to his oldest daughter, Naomi, in 2019:
I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years. It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike Pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.
Hunter later allegedly complained to his aunt, who raised him after his mother’s tragic death, that although Joe Biden co-signed student loans for Hunter and Beau Biden, he expected Hunter to pay off both loans. “Dad never paid one dime,” Hunter wrote in an email, the book says.
Devine says she found evidence that Joe Biden benefited from Hunter’s deals in multiple emails, such as one concerning “JRB bills.” In another email, detailed by Devine, dated April 12, 2018, Hunter gets locked out of one of his Wells Fargo accounts, because “[m]y dad has been using most lines on this account which I’ve through the gracious offerings of Eric [Schwerin, a close family adviser] have paid for past 11 years.” When Schwerin writes about the amount of money in “my” account, his scare quotes imply its contents belong to him in name only.
Devine traces how this began decades earlier, in Delaware.
The Biden family grift is ‘The Delaware Way’
Devine writes that the entire Biden family benefited from the “grift” run by Joe Biden — including the future president himself.
In 1975, first-term U.S. Senator Joe Biden bought a “grand 10,000-square-foot five-bedroom” DuPont mansion, “with pool house, basketball court, and manicured gardens” for $185,000, Devine writes. In 1996, he would sell the estate for $1.2 million to John Cochran, the vice-chairman of MBNA . Contemporaneous media accounts suggest that’s more than the property was worth — and Cochran financed that gain while selling his own home in nearby Maryland at a significant loss. Luckily, MBNA reimbursed Cochran $330,115 for making the move.
The New York Times reported that “Lunch Bucket Joe” upgraded to his next mansion with the help of campaign donors and “bankers with an interest in legislation before the Senate, who bought his old house for top dollar, sold him four acres at cost and lent him $500,000 to build his new home.”
The same year Devine reports, MBNA gave Hunter Biden his first job fresh out of law school, with a salary of $100,000 a year, as well as a signing bonus. Biden stayed at the firm for two years. He then moved into another $100,000-a-year job at the Clinton administration’s Commerce Department upon the recommendation of Biden lawyer William Oldaker in 1998, then to Oldaker’s lobbying firm: Oldaker, Biden & Belair.
Meanwhile, MBNA would strongly support a 2005 bankruptcy bill that made it harder for people, including members of the military, to declare bankruptcy. So would Joe Biden.
The Biden family cashes in
Joe Biden’s younger brother, Jimmy Biden, has been a lifelong beneficiary of the Biden name. “In the 1970s, as Joe was entering the Senate and taking a seat on the Banking Committee, James obtained unusually generous loans from lenders who later faced federal regulatory issues,” Politico noted. Devine says “the grift” would continue, as Jim partnered with Hunter Biden in a series of international investment schemes including in Ukraine and China.
“Don’t worry about investors,” the president’s younger brother Jim Biden reportedly told investors in his hedge fund, Paradigm Global Advisors. “We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”
Sometimes the payoffs came directly from the U.S. taxpayer. Hunter’s aunt Val received an appointment to a United Nations position that paid $26,000 over four months. Her daughters, Hunter’s cousins Missy and Casey, received full-time jobs in the Obama administration, as did Hunter’s business partner, Eric Schwerin.
But more often, the Biden family ran private enterprises that seemed to benefit from their family connections. In 2009 Joe Biden’s younger brother, Frank, engaged in casino and real estate deals in Costa Rica, after his brother flew to the isthmus, where he now handled policy for the Obama administration — much as he handled Ukrainian policy during his tussle with the government over a prosecutor looking into Burisma.
Frank touted his relationship with “my brother” in an advertisement for Boca Raton-based Berman Law Group, which pays Frank as an adviser although he is not a lawyer. As The Daily Wire reported, Frank Biden joined the environment-focused law firm “the same day that Joe, then a Democratic presidential candidate, announced his campaign’s environmental plan” in July 2018.
Family expectations reached such heights that Devine says, when Jim negotiated for his daughter Caroline Biden — whom, he emailed Hunter, had never “had a steady work environment” — to take a marketing position with an $85,000 annual salary, she hit the roof. “I have never made this little money in my life,” she replied. “I cannot survive on this.”
Yet, as Devine notes, the grift went on even as Joe Biden mounted his third presidential campaign.
“Aren’t you concerned that you’re going to put your brother’s [2020] presidential campaign at risk? You know, the Chinese, the stuff that you guys have been doing already in 2015 and 2016, around the world?” Tony Bobulinski asked brother Jim. “Jim chuckled and looked knowingly at Bobulinski,” writes Devine, before telling Bobulinski the Biden clan survives thanks to “plausible deniability.”
A Wilmington businessman named Sam Waltz once told Nation magazine, “Joe says that when someone helps his family, it’s just like helping Joe.” If that’s the case, an innumerable group of special interests and foreign governments have helped themselves into Joe Biden’s good favor through the years.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.