This Strains Credulity

A Breitbart story gives an account of two Biden experts from Conservative Inc trading scuttlebutt:

Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow said that his new New York Times bestselling book Breaking Biden includes a number of forgotten biographical details about Joe Biden, including the fact that he was tapped as former President Barack Obama’s running mate “specifically for being bad with money.”

Marlow recounted this detail during an interview about Breaking Biden on the Drill Down Podcast with seven-time New York Times bestselling investigative author Peter Schweizer.

. . . “One of the reasons why Barack Obama picked Joe Biden was specifically because he was poor,” Marlow continued. “[Obama] actually liked the optics of having one of the poorest guys in the Senate. And this is so crazy to me because we were just in an era recently where if someone made money and someone made it in America, we pointed to those people as the example—like, ‘Wow, that person really has what it takes. They know what they’re doing.’ Joe Biden’s family has made money and lost it so many times you lose count. And that was a virtue for Barack Obama["].

The information that's been coming out is that Joe has always been Joe. People don't suddently change their characters at age 65, which is when Obama put Joe on the ticket. Yet that's the claim:

“What’s remarkable about that story, by the way, is Barack Obama says, ‘I’m going to get this guy who’s poor, who they would argue hasn’t cashed in.’ And what does Joe Biden do? ‘I’m Vice President now. Now’s the opportunity to really make bank!’ I mean, it’s shocking,” Schweizer said.

Stories about Joe back in the day are starting to emerge, for instance at the UK Daily Mail:

Joe Biden sold a house to a supporter for $1.2 million in 1996 - but it is only worth an estimated $1.65 million 27 years later, DailyMail.com can reveal.

. . . Biden bought the 10,000 square-foot mansion in Greenville, Delaware for $185,000 in 1974.

At the time he had recently become a senator on a salary of $42,500.

He went on to sell the house for $1.2 million - more than six times what he paid for it - in 1996.

. . . Since 1996 the Delaware housing market has nearly tripled, according to data from the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency.

That would indicate, if the house was worth $1.2 million in 1996, it should be well over $3 million now.

The story provides details of the purchaser and his links to MBNA:

He sold it for his asking price of $1.2 million to the vice chairman of credit-card company MBNA, at the time the largest employer in Delaware.

In the same year, MBNA employees contributed $62,850 to Biden for his Senate re-election campaign, and the house buyer donated the maximum $2,000.

Also that year, Biden's son Hunter was hired by MBNA and went on to become a senior vice president.

Later, between 2001 and 2005, Hunter was re-hired as a consultant by the company on a monthly retainer.

I posted on a related story in which Joe and Hunter sold Biden family influence together as early as 2005 here. In general, members of the Biden family haven't had careers separate from Joe's ability to garner political appointments for them, sinecures connected to his own campaigns, or jobs as Biden family hustlers -- Beau has always been the chief exception. For instance, his sister Valerie says on her own website:

Valerie Biden Owens is the first woman in U.S. history to have run a presidential campaign — that of her brother, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. She also led his seven straight U.S. Senate victories and has been his principal surrogate on the campaign trail.

Valerie is Chair of the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware and a partner at Owens Patrick Leadership Seminars. Valerie sits on the Advisory Board of the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children.

Joe's brother Jim appears to have worked with Joe to peddle family influence throughout his own sketchy business career. Via a 2019 story in Politico,

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. Joe Biden was in touch with two of those banks about his brother’s loans, once to scold a bank executive about invoking his name in attempts to collect on overdue payments.

. . . During the Obama years, several months after James joined a construction firm as an executive, the firm received a contract worth more than a billion dollars to build houses in Iraq while Joe oversaw the U.S.-led occupation of that country.Along the way, James partnered with his nephew Hunter, the younger of Joe’s two sons. A graduate of Georgetown University and Yale Law School, Hunter, 49, has struggled with substance abuse while hopscotching between endeavors in law, business and politics.

Joe's brother Frank is harder to trace. Via the UK Daily Mail,

According to a memoir written by Joe's second wife Jill Biden, Frank was a student at the University of Delaware - who played Cupid for the couple in 1974, as his older brother raised his two sons alone.

But in Frank's marriage announcement in 1985, he is described as having studied at San Francisco State University.

In other places, he is described as having attended Cornell University and Pepperdine Law School in Malibu, California, where he claimed that he had developed a love of surfing.

None of the schools would confirm Frank's attendance to DailyMail.com.

He appears to have worked on Joe's Senate staff following Joe's election, and he later obtained a patronage job in the Clinton administration:

In 1993, as Bill Clinton started his first term, he obtained a $78,000-a-year political appointment as director of congressional and legislative affairs at the Government Printing Office - now the Government Publishing Office - which he held until June 1997.

In effect its chief lobbyist, he defended his appointment in June 1996 to The Wilmington News, saying that its work was outside his brother's responsibilities in the Senate and that he had been alerted to the role by a friend, not by his brother.

After that job, he apparently worked again in Joe's Senate office. The Daily Mail continues,

According to a recent ABC News investigation into the business dealings of the younger Biden, in 2009 he became involved with the Florida based for profit charity Mavericks in Education after meeting the company's founder. Asked what he role was, he said: 'I'm the big cheese.'

. . . According to ABC News a person familiar with Frank's role at Mavericks told them he was paid $70,000 per year over the course of five years – a salary that amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Over the years, ABC claims, Frank touted his famous last name and Washington connections to help land the company a series of charter contracts from local officials in Florida to open charter schools. There were private jet trips to Tallahassee to lobby lawmakers; a far cry from 2008 when his brother Joe's chief of staff said Frank had 'no assets.'

. . . His time with Mavericks was blighted by claims of mismanagement, however.

Many of the schools, which focused on educating teens with troubled backgrounds, were mired in controversy, badly under performed, suffered low graduation rates, and in lawsuits and state audits, were hit with allegations of fraud.

According to ABC News Mavericks was hit with at least two lawsuits over allegations of inflating enrollment as part of a scheme to garner more government funding. The charters were eventually sold off in 2017 to EdisonLearning.

The Biden family pattern has been that Joe's siblings, as well as Hunter, have little talent but extravagant lifestyles, along with extensive problems with substance abuse that would not normally set them up for high-flying careers, and this has been the case since Joe's election to the Senate in 1972. If they're rich -- and as of now, they're all doing quite well -- it hasn't been through their own hard work and ability. Several of the links above date from 2019, early in Joe's 2020 campaign for president, when his efort seemed to be faltering. As his prospects improved, media generally dropped these stories, but they strongly suggest the Biden family boodle has been in place for some decades.

I've never thought Barack Obama was (or is) a dummy. To think he believed Joe was the poorest man in congress suggests he was naive, which I don't believe. The mere task of vetting someone to serve on his ticket as vice president would uncover a lot in Joe's background, leaving aside that both Barack and Joe had been in the Senate together, and Barack would have heard an earful just from gossip -- but this leaves out the FBI.

Fox News’ Jesse Watters shed light on explosive revelations about the FBI’s involvement with the Biden family Wednesday night. Earlier on in the day, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) disclosed that bureau documents show the FBI had placed 40 informants within the Biden family over the past 15 years, effectively having them “wired.” The intelligence operation is reported to have been active since Joe Biden’s tenure as Vice President.

“Everything ‘Primetime’ has been saying about the FBI and the Biden family has just been confirmed,” Watters started. “For years, we’ve told you the FBI knew everything the Bidens were up to. The cash, the Chinese diamonds, American policy for sale.”

I've thought all along that Barack Obama knew everything about Joe, Valerie, Frank, Jim, and Hunter, before, during, and after -- and if anything, the FBI knows more now than it did then. It strains credulity to think otherwise.