Who Is James Biden?

The House Republicans have subpoenaed Joe's brother James's bank records as part of their impeachment investigation. Wondering why I'd never thought to do this before, I went to Wikipedia, and wonder of wonders, I discovered Jimmy has no separate entry -- he's lumped under "Siblings" in an entry for Family of Joe Biden, which reads in its entirety:

• James B. "Jim" Biden (born 1949), healthcare executive

In fact, the family calls him "Jimmy". Well above this entry is a two-paragraph chronicle of the family's pets. It sounds as though for whatever reason, we aren't going to find a single source on Jimmy that will be productive. In fact, you have to negotiate the results of web searches carefully to avoid the usual puff pieces, and stories with any substance seem to date at the latest from 2020, before the election. There doesn't seem to be any place where you can find anything like a conventional CV.

I asked Google, "Where did James Biden go to college?" and got a lot of hits for Joe and Hunter. Much farther down, I discovered:

Seven years younger than the president, James Biden, 73 [now 74], never graduated from college but has made a successful living with various business ventures, some of the most lucrative deals secured with Hunter Biden.

So we likey aren't ever going to get a good list of Jimmy's employers, dates of employment, job titles, and so forth. This piece from 2020, well before the election, seems to summarize his career as best anyone can:

Jim Biden, 70 [now 74], has cycled over the years from nightclub owner to insurance broker to political consultant and fundraiser to startup investor and construction company executive. But the through line of his resume was his bond with his brother, a Democratic Party stalwart in a position to push legislation or make government contracts happen.

“My sense is that Jim really has been trying to peddle himself on the Biden name for some time,” said Curtis Wilkie, who covered the Bidens as a Delaware political reporter.

However, the pattern of Jimmy's business activities and finances tracks even closer to Hunter's, although much of the evidence in the stories published before the election comes from outside the end dates covered by Hunter's laptop, which makes it even more useful. For instance, in the same source:

It was December 2006, not long before Jim’s older brother and Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, then a Delaware senator, would announce his second campaign for president. [Remember, the laptop covers roughly 2010 to 2019.]

Jim and Hunter Biden got a loan from a bank founded by one of Joe’s political backers — William Oldaker, an attorney for the senator’s presidential campaign and Hunter’s partner at a Washington law and lobbying firm.

Oldaker had strong ties to Joe Biden’s political operation, and at the time, the bank, WashingtonFirst, had nearly half a million dollars in deposits from a Joe Biden political committee Oldaker had helped set up.

. . . The bank required that loans be well secured by borrowers’ assets. Jim Biden put up his house in Merion Station, Pennsylvania, as collateral, but he already had $1.5 million in three mortgages against the property, then roughly valued at just over $1.1 million. Hunter offered as security his recently purchased Washington home, for which he had borrowed almost the entire purchase price.

. . . It was not the first time — or the last — during his long career that Jim Biden turned to Joe’s political network for the kind of assistance that would have been almost unimaginable for someone with a different last name. Campaign donors helped him face a series of financial problems, including a series of IRS liens totaling more than $1 million that made it harder to get bank financing. Jim Biden took out two more loans from WashingtonFirst before its sale in 2018.

Another episode from 2006 is outlined in Politico, which the site claimed in 2020 was "the most comprehensive account to date of the politically tinged business activities of Biden’s brother and son". In 2006, Jimmy and Hunter took over Paradigm Global Advisors, a shaky investment firm founded by the son-in-law of Sun Myung Moon, a South Korean cult leader. According to the link,

The Biden involvement began in January 2006. James Biden called Anthony Lotito, a New York financial adviser, and said his older brother, Joe, wanted his son Hunter to find a job outside of lobbying to avoid damaging his planned campaign for the presidency, according to a complaint Lotito later filed in a New York court, after his relationship with James and Hunter soured.

. . . Things quickly got messy. The prospective purchasers discovered that because of an accounting trick, the fund had only a fraction of the $1.5 billion in assets under management that it claimed, according to court filings.

James and Hunter also discovered that the attorney the trio had hired on Lotito’s recommendation to explore the purchase, John Fasciana, had recently been convicted on 12 counts of fraud, according to court filings.

. . . According to an agreement Lotito and James made with Paradigm in May 2006 that later surfaced in their court fight, they had planned to use their connections to union pension funds governed by the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act, which regulates labor unions, in order to steer new investments to Paradigm.

. . . Firefighters unions have been among Joe Biden’s closest political allies since the start of his political career.

. . . James and Hunter had taken out a loan from WashingtonFirst Bank, which had been co-founded by one of Hunter’s former lobbying partners. A former WashingtonFirst executive said James and Hunter had pledged their houses on the loan and both had paid back their debts after several years.

In the meantime, that debt was causing friction within Paradigm.

At one point, the executive said, Hunter called him and asked him to hand over $21,000 in company funds for a personal mortgage payment. When the executive refused, saying the funds were needed to cover operating expenses, he recalled that Hunter — who recently told The New Yorker he has spent most of his life living paycheck to paycheck — responded that he might lose his house.

“Hunter did take substantial dollars out of the company,” said a second former Paradigm executive, describing the withdrawals as a “semi-regular” subject of discussion and concern within the firm.

. . . A third former executive at Paradigm claimed that at one point around 2008 or 2009, James and Hunter withdrew several million dollars from Paradigm’s coffers for their own use. By this point, “The Bidens didn’t have access to the day-to-day operation of Paradigm at all,” this executive said. “The only thing the Bidens could do was get paid or request to get money out of the hedge fund.” The executive said the Bidens had the right to withdraw the funds and that the transaction was cleared through counsel.

. . . Another former executive said negative press about Paradigm’s ties to fraudulent funds made James and Hunter wary of more scrutiny of “potential conflicts of interest or tie-ins to the Biden family.” As a result, the executive said, “They really just chose to liquidate the hedge fund and give back the money to the investors.” The former WashingtonFirst executive said James and Hunter shut down Paradigm because the global recession had cut into its revenues.

. . . According to a 2013 New Republic story on the Unification Church, [Sun Myung Moon's son-in-law] Park, who did not respond to requests for comment, was never able to collect from James and Hunter on the promissory note they used to acquire the fund.

The piece recounts elsewhere that Jimmy had run the finances for Joe's initial 1972 Senate campaign.

No sooner was freshman lawmaker Joe Biden seated on the Senate Banking Committee than James became the beneficiary of business loans that were described in news accounts at the time as unusually generous because of the relatively large amount of money he was able to borrow with little or no collateral and a lack of relevant prior experience.

In early 1973, on the heels of Joe’s election to the Senate, James Biden and a business partner decided to open a nightclub.

The club, Seasons Change, located in a shopping plaza near the Pennsylvania state line, would eventually fail, leaving behind it a trail of debt and a trickle of embarrassing revelations about its financing.

The pair had obtained a series of loans for $80,000, $60,000 and $25,000 from Wilmington’s Farmers Bank. At least one of those loans was unsecured, meaning it was not backed by collateral that could be seized if the borrowers stopped paying.

When James began missing his payments and risking default, his brother Joe became angry — at the bank.

“What I’d like to know,” the junior senator told his hometown paper in 1977, “is how the guy in charge of loans let it get this far.”

The paper looked into it: “The answer, according to three former officers of the troubled Farmers Bank, is the Biden name,” reported Delaware’s News Journal. According to the paper, the bank thought the senatorial name would attract club-goers.

It did not attract enough to turn a profit, and by 1975, the bank was having problems collecting from James.

. . . Another figure tied to Farmers Bank, the politically connected financier Norman Rales, extended James Biden an unsecured loan.

. . . These unusual arrangements came to light after Farmers Bank nearly collapsed in 1976, forcing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to bail it out. The crisis spurred several investigations into the bank’s lending practices and political connections. It also prompted Moody’s to downgrade the state of Delaware’s credit rating from A1 to A because the state’s finances were so intertwined with the bank’s.

These stories provide insight that hasn't been available elsewhere into how Joe's family used his influence often to bilk banks and investors hoping to gain favor with Joe. Jimmy's loans from Farmers Bank took place when Hunter, born 1n 1970, was in elementary school. The Politico piece also refers to another James Biden enterprise, the Lion Hall Group:

[A]fter a stint selling real estate in San Francisco, [James] returned to the East Coast and set up a new firm, the Lion Hall Group.

This appears to have been in the mid-1990s.

In 1995, famed Mississippi trial lawyer Dickie Scruggs set his sights on a gargantuan national settlement with Big Tobacco worth hundreds of billions of dollars. To make such a settlement work, Congress would have to bless it by immunizing the tobacco companies against future legal claims.

. . . As part of an effort to win over Joe and other Democrats, Scruggs hired James’ Lion Hall Group to help with a “legislative, executive, political and social” campaign, according to Wilkie’s book. Neither James nor Lion Hall appear in federal lobbying disclosures.

While the lobbying effort failed in that case, it's worth noting that Jimmy's Lion Hall Group is still in existence, and it has attracted the Republicans' interest in the current impeachment inquiry:

Last year, Senate Republicans scrutinized James Biden's business ventures, releasing records that showed payments James Biden's company, The Lion Hall Group, received from a Chinese-financed consulting group in 2018, and monthly retainers to James and Hunter Biden.

As I've been saying, there's a great deal to the Biden chronology outside the 2010-2019 period of the laptop, and there's also a great deal that involves relatives other than Hunter.