Former Vice President Joe Biden will make his first morning show appearance in months on Wednesday when he sits down with MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
As the timing of the interview coincides with the release of the Peter Schweizer’s highly anticipated book Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, Breitbart News is highlighting a number of questions that remain unanswered about how the former vice president’s family seemed to benefit from his political influence.
1. How did Joe Biden’s brother, Frank, secure $45,000,000 in taxpayer loans from the Obama administration for his Caribbean projects?
As detailed by Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News who is also the president of the Government Accountability Institute, Frank Biden has made a lucrative career since 2009 in the Caribbean, especially in solar power and real estate.
Despite having no extensive background in either of the fields, or international development for the matter, Frank and his company, Sun Fun Americas, have found tremendous opportunities in both Jamaica and Costa Rica. In particular, projects linked to Frank in those two countries were on the receiving end of more than $45 million in U.S. taxpayer-backed loans during the Obama years.
2. What was Hunter Biden’s involvement in the Burnham Financial Group?
A firm started by Hunter and his longtime business partner Devon Archer allegedly scored hundreds of millions from Russian and Chinese interests. The Burnham Financial Group, according to Profiles in Corruption, was used by the duo to broker deals with foreign governments and oligarchs.
A number of those deals were with shadowy groups like Kirin Global Enterprise Limited. Little is known about the firm run by Xiangyao “Larry” Liu and Guo Jianfeng apart from that it is one of the biggest real estate investors in Mainland China.
Burnham also had a financial relationship with Yelena Baturina, a Russian oligarch with extensive political and criminal connections in Moscow. According to Schweizer’s book, Baturina invested $200 million in “various” funds with which Archer was involved.
The group was dismantled after Archer was arrested for using it in a $60 million bond scheme designed to rip off union pension funds and the poorest Indian tribes in the U.S.
Although Hunter escaped the situation without legal repercussions, Schweizer writes that “his fingerprints were all over Burnham.”
3. How did a newly-minted firm employing Joe Biden’s other brother, James, receive a $1.5 billion contract to build homes in Iraq—despite no experience?
In 2010, fresh off a disastrous attempt at running a Wall Street hedge fund, James Biden joined HillStone International as executive vice president. The newly founded company was run by Kevin Justice, a longtime family friend of the Bidens. Under Justice’s leadership, HillStone International was setting out to pursue construction and technology projects, especially those being funded by the U.S. government in Iraq.
Hiring James, who had neither experience in construction nor international development, seemed to be a big part of the company’s strategy to secure such projects. When announcing the hire, Hillstone touted the political connections James had built up through helping run his older brother’s political campaigns.
Six months after James was hired, the company received a contract, estimated to be worth upwards of $1.5 billion, to build more than 100,000 homes in Iraq. As a minority partner in the firm, James would have been eligible to split more than $735 million in profits upon the contract’s completion.
4. Why was Hunter Biden hired by Burisma Holdings?
One of the biggest mysteries in American political life at the moment revolves around Hunter Biden’s wheeling and dealing in Ukraine. The former vice president’s youngest son joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company, in May 2014. Hunter secured the appointment, which paid as much as $83,000-per-month, despite having no background in the energy industry or Ukraine.
The timing of the appointment drew scrutiny, as it occurred around the same time that Joe Biden was tasked with leading the Obama administration’s policy towards Ukraine in light of Russia’s invasion of Crimea.
A Ukrainian official with strong ties to Burisma’s founder has admitted the only reason Hunter was appointed to the board of directors was to “protect” the company from foreign scrutiny.
5. How much did Joe Biden know about his son’s work in Ukraine?
Since Hunter’s role with Burisma was highlighted by Schweizer in Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Joe Biden has consistently changed his history on how much he knew about the matter.
First the former vice president claimed he never spoke to his son about Burisma, a claim Hunter, himself, has contradicted. Then, Joe Biden claimed he was unaware his son was even on the company’s board of directors. His story shifted once again when countless witnesses came before the House impeachment hearings and admitted they were so troubled by the Burisma issue that they attempted to broach the topic with Joe Biden’s White House staff.
After those revelations, the former vice president again changed his story. This time, he claimed that aides never warned him about the potential conflicts of interest posed by Hunter’s service with Burisma.
As Breitbart News has reported, that most recent claim is not only contradicted by one of the former vice president’s top foreign policy advisers, but also by the timeline of events surrounding the scandal.
6. Did Hunter Biden sell his stock in Bohai Harvest RST?
As revealed in Secret Empires, Ukraine was not the only foreign country where Hunter had lucrative business dealings. In 2012, Hunter inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the state-owned bank of China to create a private equity fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR).
The timing of the deal has been brought into question, as it came only 12 days after Hunter visited China with his father aboard Air Force Two. Officially, the then-vice president was visiting the country amid escalating tensions over islands in the South China Sea. On a whim, Biden supposedly decided to bring his granddaughter and son along.
After the visit, once BHR was up and running, the fund proceeded to invest heavily in energy and defense projects. Some of those investments, however, have caught the eye of congressional investigators. Most notably, BHR’s purchase of an American company with insight into military technology and its investment in another firm recently blacklisted by the U.S. government has raised eyebrows.
In light of such developments, Hunter resigned from the company’s board in October, but did not address what he would do with his ten percent ownership stake.