Who Is Hunter Biden?
Joe Biden’s obvious nepotism problem with his son goes back a long time.
Joe Biden is a grandfather for the sixth time, as it was confirmed two weeks ago that his son Hunter is indeed the father of a “Baby Doe.” DNA tests confirmed that the baby born in Arkansas was the child of Hunter. This story serves to highlight Joe’s Hunter problem. It’s not a new problem; it’s an old one that has dogged the Democrat presidential candidate for years. Hunter Biden is the child who epitomizes nepotism.
Was there anything Hunter earned without leaning on his father’s name? Just two years after graduating from Yale Law School, Hunter was promoted to senior vice president of Delaware-based MBNA bank, where he had been hired right out of school as a consultant. In the mid-1990s, MBNA had begun donating heavily to both political parties, including to the then-longtime senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, in an effort to leverage legislative support.
In 1998, Hunter left MBNA for a post at the Commerce Department, where he worked on electronic commerce issues until 2001 when he returned to MBNA as a monthly consultant. The New York Times reported, “Consumer advocates say that Senator Biden was one of the first Democratic leaders to support the bankruptcy bill, and he voted for it four times.” MBNA had actively lobbied for the legislation.
National Review notes, “[Hunter] Biden also separately worked as a lobbyist until 2008, founding the firm Oldaker Biden & Belair, where he represented mostly universities and hospitals” and drug companies, and while “Hunter says he has never lobbied his father on any client matter” … “the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest allegedly troubled the senator at one point.” National Review adds that according to “former business partner Joseph Lotito, Joe Biden wanted Hunter Biden to find a different line of work because his presidential campaign would be greatly complicated if he remained the father of a Washington lobbyist.”
Hunter agreed to his father’s demand and ended his lobbying practice in Washington and turned his attention toward founding “a boutique consulting firm” called Rosemont Seneca that worked to help small and medium-sized business in the U.S. and overseas expand into the U.S. market. It wasn’t long before Hunter and Chinese private-equity fund manager Jonathan Li became partners, starting a new company investing in Chinese capital. In 2013 came the now-infamous photo of then-Vice President Joe Biden shaking Li’s hand in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel. “Less than two weeks later,” National Review reports, “Hunter Biden’s firm inked a $1 billion private equity deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China.”
In 2014, Hunter joined the board of Ukraine energy giant Burisma for a lucrative salary of $50,000 per month. The move concerned Obama administration officials who recognized the potential for a conflict of interest, though they claimed to have never brought the matter up to Joe Biden. And Joe Biden has now contradicted himself when asked if he ever discussed Burisma with his son – he did indeed.
Moreover, recall that Joe Biden bragged on the record about how, in 2015 as VP, he coerced Ukraine to fire a prosecutor — which even The New York Times acknowledged benefited Hunter Biden, who was a target for investigation. As Biden recounted, if Ukrainian officials didn’t “take action against the state prosecutor” (fire him), “I said … ‘We’re not going to give you the billion dollars. … I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars.’ … Well, son of a b—h. He got fired.”
Not only is Hunter Biden’s life filler for the tabloids, such as the recent revelation of his “Baby Doe”, but his drug addiction got him kicked out of the Navy. Hunter is the classic playboy son, leveraging his father’s political position to secure himself lucrative deals. And those deals likely included special accesses to his high-profile father.