Former Vice President Joe Biden told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he would avoid conflicts between his family’s business interests and his job as president — a promise he failed to honor during the Obama-Biden administration.
As Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer has demonstrated, several of Biden’s family members have used his position to gain access to wealth and opportunity — most notoriously his son, Hunter Biden.
In August 2019, Biden said (as reported by Politico:
“I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses. Period,” he said. “And what I will do is the same thing we did in our administration. There will be an absolute wall between personal and private [business interests] and the government. There wasn’t any hint of scandal at all when we were there. And I’m going to propose the same kind of strict, strict rules. That’s why I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else — even distant family — about their business interests. Period.”
Hunter Biden contradicted his father in September 2019, noting that they had discussed Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine at least once while his father was in office. Joe Biden infamously withheld $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees from Ukraine — by then under military assault from Russia — unless the Ukrainian government fired a prosecutor who had jurisdiction over inquiries into Burisma, the firm that had appointed Hunter Biden to a lucrative board position in 2014.
Emails released by the New York Post in October from a laptop apparently belonging to Hunter showed that Joe Biden had met with one of Hunter’s associates at Burisma. The emails also revealed Hunter Biden later tried to create a joint venture in 2017 with a Chinese company, in which Joe Biden was allegedly to have held a 10% stake.
Tapper did not ask Biden about these stories — which CNN has tried to suppress — but about future conflicts:
TAPPER: When your son, Hunter came under scrutiny during the campaign, you vowed, “No one in my family or associated with me will be involved in any foreign operation whatsoever, period, end of story.” Will your brothers? Will your son take leave from any business interests? Not just foreign, but any business interests that might create any even appearance of impropriety.
BIDEN: My son, my family will not be involved in any business, any enterprise that is in conflict with or appears to be in conflict with where there’s appropriate distance from the president and government.
Breitbart News reported in July that Hunter Biden still owned a ten percent stake in Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), the firm he co-founded with a billion-dollar commitment from a Chinese government-controlled firm after a trip with his father to China in 2013 aboard Air Force Two.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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