Hunter Biden used Joe’s VP perks to pursue deal with Carlos Slim

Hunter Biden used the perks of the vice presidency — parties, meetings with Joe Biden and flights on Air Force Two — to pursue business deals with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim while his father was in office, records show.

Hunter’s involvement with Slim, at one time the world’s richest man, commenced soon after a White House state dinner the magnate attended in May 2010, along with Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, to honor Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

The diary on Hunter’s abandoned laptop shows he and Slim were both guests at a State Department luncheon during Calderon’s visit, which was hosted by his father and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Spanish tenor Placido Domingo also reportedly attended.

The charmed path that always opens for Hunter when his father meets a foreign leader or oligarch led him to Mexico on a VIP trip the following year. Hunter’s diary in May 2011 shows a “tentative tour hosted by Carlos Slim” of the tycoon’s private “Soumaya Museum,” in Mexico City, which Slim founded and named after his late wife, Soumaya Domit. Containing priceless sculptures from pre-Spanish Mesoamerica, it is the most visited museum in the country. There could be no greater honor offered to Hunter than a private tour with the billionaire founder.

Hunter also had breakfast with Slim’s friend, Mexican billionaire Carlos Bremer, at his magnificent villa in the shadow of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range in Monterrey. Bremer, former director of the country’s stock exchange, had donated millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and sat on the foundation’s board.

Column: Being Biden’s son has its privileges
By MICHELLE MALKIN Columnist
https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/opinion/column-being-bidens-son-has-its-privileges/article_ffcde320-bb57-5d68-a9a1-58ed34251080.html
Oct 17, 2019

I wrote the book on the Obama administration’s “Culture of Corruption” 10 years ago, including a thick and sordid chapter on the Beltway swamp creatures of the Biden family. See-no-evil liberals scoffed at my catalogue of back-scratching, shady Delaware deals and Wall Street funny money: What nepotism? What ethical lapses? What corruption?

Now, Hunter Biden himself, the youngest son of former Vice President and Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, finally admitted this week what Daddy’s pooh-poohing pals have long (publicly) denied:

“I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden,” Hunter confessed on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Tuesday.

Well, knock me over with a feather and plaster-cast my shocked face.

On cue, the Dems’ favorite “GOP strategist,” swamp lobbyist wife and anti-Trump loudmouth Ana Navarro Cardenas, cooed over Hunter’s “self-awareness” and “humility.” But even as the theatrically humbled Hunter admitted his privilege (staged the morning before Biden the Senior faced off for the fourth high-stakes Democratic presidential debate), he insisted he was as “qualified” as “anybody else” for his $50k-a-month gig at Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings.

After all, Hunter puffed: “I was vice chairman of the board of Amtrak for five years. I was the chairman of the board of the U.N. World Food Program. I was a lawyer for Boies Schiller Flexner, one of the most prestigious law firms in the world.”

Hold up, Sonny Boy. Reciting a litany of your unqualified domestic appointments to bolster the qualifications of your foreign gigs lacks – what’s the word? – self-awareness. “GMA” hostess Amy Robach, who had promised a “no holds barred” grilling, whiffed on fully informing viewers about Hunter’s lifelong biography of conflicts of interest and cashing in.

The Burisma “mistake” is a feature, not a bug, in the bubble-protected life and times of Delaware’s dirty Democrat dynasty. I repeat:

• Hunter’s first job, acquired after Joe Biden won his 1996 Senate reelection bid in Delaware, was with MBNA. The credit card conglomerate and top campaign finance donor forked over nearly $63,000 in bundled primary and general contributions from its employees to then-Sen. Biden – who secured his custom-built, multimillion-dollar house in Delaware’s ritziest Chateau Country neighborhood with the help of a leading MBNA corporate executive. Average Joe went on to carry legislative water for MBNA in the Senate for years.

• Hunter quickly ascended to senior vice president at MBNA by early 1998 and then scored a plum position in the Clinton administration’s Commerce Department, specializing in “electronic commerce” before returning to MBNA three years later as a high-priced “consultant.” While he collected those “consulting” (translation: nepotistic access-trading) fees, Hunter became a “founding partner” in the lobbying firm of Oldaker, Biden and Belair in 2002.

• William Oldaker was Papa Biden’s former fundraiser, campaign treasurer and general counsel – a Beltway barnacle whose Democratic machine days dated back to Teddy Kennedy’s 1980 presidential bid. Under Oldaker’s mentorship, Hunter lobbied for drug companies, universities and other deep-pocketed clients to the tune of nearly $4 million billed to the company by 2007. Then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama personally requested and secured cozy taxpayer-subsidized earmarks for several of Hunter’s clients.

• Hunter also was a top official at Paradigm Global Advisors, a hedge fund holding company founded with Joe Biden’s brother, James, and marketed by convicted finance fraudster Allen Stanford. As Paradigm chairman, Hunter oversaw half a billion dollars of client money invested in hedge funds while remaining a lobbyist at Oldaker, Biden and Belair. The ill-fated venture went bust amid nasty fraud lawsuits.

• The Biden Bro received a $500,000 loan from the family’s longtime donor, “friend” and Ukrainian-American businessman John Hynansky, which helped bail Uncle James Biden out of debt he racked up while renovating a massive, south Florida beachfront estate. Hynansky was also entangled in a messy Delaware real estate deal with Biden pal and convicted campaign finance and tax fraudster Chris Tigani, who spent two years in prison for laundering political donations through straw donors to Biden’s presidential campaign committee.

• Hunter then snagged a seat on the board of directors of taxpayer-subsidized, stimulus-inflated Amtrak, where he pretended not to be a lobbyist, but rather an “effective advocate” for the government railroad system serving the 1-percenters’ D.C.-NYC corridor.

And all of this was before Qualified-As-Anybody-Else Hunter snagged his lucrative foreign gigs in Ukraine and China (not to mention the humiliating interlude when he was booted from the Navy Reserve in 2014 for cocaine use while “working” as a public affairs officer – a cushy, part-time job he secured only after finagling waivers for his age and a previous drug offense). The law license Hunter is so proud of earning was conveniently protected from review and revocation.

Bidenspawn-ship has its privileges – lavishly underwritten by “Average Joe’s” half century-long career on the public teat.

Revealed: Joe Biden twice used his position as senator to intervene to boost son Hunter’s lobbying
by Alana Goodman, Investigative Political Reporter | The Washington Examiner / Oct 24, 2019

Joe Biden privately contacted the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice when he was a senior and influential U.S. senator to discuss issues that his son Hunter’s firm was being paid to lobby on, according to government records.

On at least two occasions, Biden contacted federal departments to discuss issues related to Hunter’s firm’s lobbying clients, according to records reviewed by the Washington Examiner.

Biden’s behind-the-scenes outreach illustrates how his Senate work overlapped with his son’s business interests. Biden has faced scrutiny for taking actions that were perceived to benefit his son’s work, including calling for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor and backing policies that helped the Delaware-based credit card industry while Hunter was working for MBNA, which is headquartered in the state.

Government records show that Biden, who has always insisted he knows nothing about his son’s business activities, helped Hunter’s work with strategic and highly specific interventions that could have benefited his son to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

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. The trade group, which represents companies that provide safety training for chemical facility employees, was mounting a heavy lobbying campaign over section 550, submitting congressional testimony about the need to expand background checks for chemical plant employees.

The Industrial Safety Training Council was seeking to expand the “language in DHS legislation regarding security clearance and credentialing for chemical facility employees and employers” in January 2007, according to lobbying disclosure records.

While Hunter Biden did not register as an individual lobbyist for the trade association, he was one of three senior partners in his firm at the time. The Industrial Safety Training Council paid Oldaker, Biden & Belair a total of $200,000 between early 2007 and the end of 2008.

The Biden campaign did not respond to request for comment. The National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group, said Biden should have avoided involvement with issues that his son’s firm was also lobbying on because of the appearance of conflict.

“It’s implausible Sen. Biden did not know his son’s firm was lobbying on this arcane issue,” said Tom Anderson, the director of NLPC’s Government Integrity Project.

“Sometimes appearances are exactly what they are,” he said. “This is a recurring problem we’ve seen on the Hill, where family members are enriched because of their relationship with a member.”

Biden also 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.

“I write to request your assistance in implementing an expanded background check system for our nation’s volunteer organizations,” wrote Biden. “If we can work together to expand the number of volunteer organizations that have access to fast, accurate, and inexpensive fingerprint background checks, we will make significant and important strides in our ongoing effort to protect kids across our country.”

Biden added, “I would like to convene a small meeting with key representatives” from DOJ, the FBI, members of Congress and volunteer groups.

One of Hunter’s firm’s lobbying clients at the time, a coalition of state-level criminal justice advocates called SEARCH, was also lobbying the federal government for a broader fingerprint screening system at the time.

The same day as Biden’s letter, SEARCH adopted a resolution calling on Congress to consider “any effort to improve the quality, completeness and accessibility of criminal history records” and expand the current system to “allow the return of all criminal history record information maintained by the States on the search subject through a single fingerprint check.”

The group initially hired Oldaker, Biden & Belair in 2006 to lobby for federal funding for state-level criminal justice programs, paying the firm $114,000 over the next year. In early 2008, SEARCH was seeking funding “to assist states in development and use of information to accelerate automation of fingerprint authentication processes and criminal justice data which are compatible with the FBI’s” system, according to lobbying records.

Biden introduced a bill called the “Child Protection Improvements Act” on March 13, 2008, which created a national fingerprint background check system for volunteer groups that worked with children. Oldaker, Biden & Belair promptly began lobbying for the bill on behalf of their client, SEARCH, according to lobbying records. SEARCH paid the firm $93,000 in 2008, records show.

Hunter Biden founded Oldaker, Biden & Belair with William Oldaker, a former adviser to his father. During his time at the firm, he was registered to lobby for clients on issues ranging from online gambling to higher education. After Biden became a vice presidential candidate in 2008, Hunter stepped away from lobbying, and the firm was renamed Oldaker, Belair & Wittie.

ABC News reported last week that Biden was concerned conflicts with his son’s lobbying work could negatively affect his presidential run in 2008.

Biden was “concerned with the impact that Hunter’s lobbying activities might have on his expected campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination,” according to court documents filed by a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s in 2007, ABC News reported.

“Because my dad was vice president of the United States, there’s literally nothing, as a young man or as a full-grown adult, that my father in some way hasn’t had influence over,” Hunter told the outlet in an interview.

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