Former Vice President Joe Biden’s younger brother James is being accused of securing a big-money loan from a healthcare company now under federal investigation and facing bankruptcy.
James, who has a history of muddled financial dealings, reportedly used his political ties to convince executives at Americore Health, a rural healthcare firm, to loan him $650,000. The younger Biden, who worked for the company between 2017 and 2019, got the personal loan after helping Americore secure an even bigger bridge loan from a hedge fund run by one of his associates, Michael Lewitt. According to court documents and former Americore executives, James Biden convinced the firm’s leadership to sign off on both by promising he would be able to secure larger investments from Middle Eastern contacts thanks to his family’s name.
“In 2017 and 2018, James Biden was embarking on a foray into health care investing, telling potential partners, including at Americore, that his last name could open doors and that Joe Biden was excited about the public policy implications of their business models, according to court filings and interviews with James’ former business contact,” Politico reported on Monday.
A former Americore executive, Tom Pritchard, told Politico that shortly after James Biden received the $650,000 personal loan, his day-to-day role in the firm decreased.
“Jim needed to lay low because his brother was possibly running for president, and he didn’t need any bad press,” Pritchard said.
Meanwhile, without investment incoming, Americore struggled under already tight finances to make its model for the acquisition of rural hospitals work. The cause would eventually fail, with the company being forced to file bankruptcy in December 2019.
Americore’s poor financial shape is only one side of the story. The firm is also under federal investigation after a lawsuit filed in Tennessee in July 2019 alleged Americore and its leadership of fraud.
Michael Frey and his business partner, Dr. Mohannad Azzam, brought the suit claiming James Biden and his associates promised and failed to line up investors for their rural healthcare enterprise. Instead, the suit alleges, James Biden urged the two men to borrow $10 million from a hedge fund manager involved in the deal and then proceeded to pass their idea off as his own to a conglomerate of Turkish investors.
“The lawsuit takes direct aim at Biden, painting him as a con artist who uses his ties to his brother — now a Democratic candidate for president — to lure his victims,” the Knoxville News Sentinel reported.
According to documents filed with the U.S. District Court, Frey and his wife developed a business model to take over rural hospitals and retrofit them to not only offer traditional hospital care, but also drug addiction and mental health treatment. After incorporating the enterprise as Diverse Medical Management, they brought on Azzam, “who contracted with nursing homes to provide medical care for seniors.”
The business model was lucrative enough that by 2017, Frey and Azzam were actively pitching it to investors and hospitals across the country. One investor particularly taken with the idea was Americore.
At the behest of Americore CEO Grant White, Frey and Azzam were urged to pitch their business plan to rural hospitals in Kentucky. It was at one such meeting where the two men met James Biden, who identified himself as a “principal” at Americore.
Not long after their initial encounter, James Biden introduced the men to Lewitt, a hedge fund manager and well-known “credit strategist.” Around this time, Americore made plans to buy Diverse Medical for the sum of $7 million.
Despite the deal, Americore quickly fell behind on its scheduled payments to Frey and Azzam. It was then that James Biden and Lewitt, as detailed in the lawsuit, hatched a plan to oust White and sell Americore along with Diverse Medical to a third company called the Platinum Group. Frey and Azzam appear to have been uncomfortable with the turn the deal took, especially the notion of removing White. The men, though, went along with the plan after being told a payout was “imminent.”
“They repeatedly assured (Frey) that investment capital originating from and flowing through foreign entities was not only certain, but was imminent,” documents filed by Frey and Azzam’s attorney state.
This is not the first time that James Biden’s business dealings have raised eyebrows. As Breitbart News reported in January, James Biden received more than $1.5 billion in government-backed contracts during the Obama administration. The revelations were first extensively detailed in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite—a new book by Peter Schweizer, senior contributor at Breitbart News and president of the Government Accountability Institute.
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.