Two new reports that were published late this week raised more questions about the role that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden played in his son’s business dealings while he was vice president and while he was a U.S. Senator.
NBC News reported on Thursday that Biden’s son, Hunter, traveled to Romania during the final year of the Obama administration to meet with a wealthy businessman who was accused of corruption:
The businessman was Gabriel “Puiu” Popoviciu, a wealthy Romanian real estate tycoon. The lawyer brought in to advise him was Hunter Biden, the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Hunter Biden’s work for Popoviciu in 2016 went unreported at the time, but Joe Biden’s involvement in Romania was very much public. The vice president was among the leading voices pushing the government to crack down on corruption.
Government ethics experts told NBC News that they believe that the arrangement raises questions about whether Hunter Biden was brought in to help Popoviciu avoid criminal prosecution.
Kathleen Clark, a Washington University law professor who specializes in government ethics, told NBC News: “We don’t know what [Hunter Biden] was paid or what he was paid for, but it does raise questions of whether this Romanian individual facing criminal charges was actually paying for a connection to the American vice president.”
The criminal case against Popoviciu started in 2005 when a criminal complaint was lodged against him and the rector of a Romanian university regarding a large purchase of land near Bucharest.
NBC News added:
The businessman claimed Popoviciu had purchased the land for “significantly less money than it was actually worth,” the documents say. Further, the businessman alleged the plot wasn’t the property of the University of Agronomy, but was instead owned by the Romanian government, according to the documents…
…The university rector was charged in March 2009 with abusing his position and Popoviciu was charged with “complicity in abuse of position,” the documents show. Two months later, Popoviciu was hit with a bribery charge…
…Romania was by then a familiar place to the Biden family. A close friend and former staffer of Joe Biden, Mark Gitenstein, held the position of U.S. ambassador to Romania from August 2009 to December 2012. In March 2012, Hunter’s brother, Beau, was asked to do the ribbon-cutting at the new U.S. embassy in Bucharest.
NBC News noted that it is not clear how much assistance Hunter Biden provided to Popoviciu as Popoviciu’s bid to overturn his conviction failed and he was sentenced to seven years in prison.
In 2014, Vice President Biden slammed corruption during a speech in Romania, saying in part:
Corruption is a cancer, a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs, and, most importantly, it denies the people their dignity. It saps the collective strength and resolve of a nation. Corruption is just another form of tyranny.
And corruption can represent a clear and present danger not only to a nation’s economy, but to its very national security. There are nations, and we’ve seen it recently, that exploit corruption to exercise malign influence and undermine the very sovereignty and independence of their neighbors.
In this way, corruption has become an instrument of foreign policy for some nations. When politicians can be bought, when courts can be manipulated, when the media becomes a tool of propaganda, there you will find a society that is susceptible to manipulation from the outside. There you’ll find a society that loses control of its own destiny – not only its political security, but its physical security and military readiness is also compromised…
…So fighting corruption is more than just good government. It’s self-defense. It’s a guarantor of your national sovereignty.
The second problematic news development that surfaced late this week came from the Washington Examiner, which reported that then-Senator Biden had privately contacted two government departments to discuss issues that Hunter Biden’s firm was being paid to lobby on.
The Washington Examiner reported:
On Feb. 28, 2007, Biden contacted DHS to express that he was “concerned about the Department’s proposed chemical security regulations authorized by Section 550 of DHS Appropriations Act of 2007,” according to the department’s log of its contacts with members of Congress.
Section 550, which was passed in 2006 as part of the DHS appropriations bill, requires high-risk chemical plants to submit site safety plans to DHS for approval, including security credentialing and training for employees.
Eight weeks earlier, the Industrial Safety Training Council had hired Hunter Biden’s firm to lobby DHS on the issue.
Director of the National Legal and Policy Center Tom Anderson told the Washington Examiner: “It’s implausible Sen. Biden did not know his son’s firm was lobbying on this arcane issue. Sometimes appearances are exactly what they are. This is a recurring problem we’ve seen on the Hill, where family members are enriched because of their relationship with a member.”
The Washington Examiner then noted that in 2007, Biden “sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Jan. 31, 2007 requesting a meeting with the Department of Justice to discuss expanding the federal fingerprint background check system.”
At the same time that Biden sent the letter, Hunter Biden’s firm was lobbying for a “coalition of state-level criminal justice advocates called SEARCH,” which was “lobbying the federal government for a broader fingerprint screening system at the time.”
These latest issues to emerge for the Biden campaign come after the former vice president has been slammed for months regarding allegations of corruption over his role in getting a prosecutor fired who was investigating a company that was paying his son in Ukraine.
“In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin,” according to The Hill.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled saying. “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”
Joe and Hunter Biden have also faced allegations of corruption over their work in China.
“In 2013, then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden flew aboard Air Force Two to China. Less than two weeks later, Hunter Biden’s firm inked a $1 billion private equity deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China,” investigative researcher Peter Schweizer reported. “The deal was later expanded to $1.5 billion. In short, the Chinese government funded a business that it co-owned along with the son of a sitting vice president.”
Less than a year after Biden helped open a company called “Rosemont Seneca,” he and his business partners were in China meeting with top Chinese officials.
“The timing of this meeting was also notable. It occurred just hours before Hunter Biden’s father, the vice president, met with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Washington as part of the Nuclear Security Summit,” Schweizer added. “Twelve days after Hunter stepped off Air Force Two in Beijing, his company signed a historic deal with the Bank of China, the state-owned financial behemoth often used as a tool of the Chinese government. The Bank of China had created a first-of-its-kind investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). According to BHR, one of its founding partners was none other than Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC.”