XPost: alt.politics.miserable-failure, talk.politics.guns, sac.politics
XPost: alt.politics.republicans, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns From: democrat-criminals@mail.house.gov

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/02/joe-biden- investigation-hunter-brother-hedge-fund-money-2020-campaign-227407/

The day the Bidens took over Paradigm Global Advisors was a memorable one.

In the late summer of 2006 Joe Biden’s son Hunter and Joe’s younger
brother, James, purchased the firm. On their first day on the job, they
showed up with Joe’s other son, Beau, and two large men and ordered the
hedge fund’s chief of compliance to fire its president, according to a
Paradigm executive who was present.

After the firing, the two large men escorted the fund’s president out of
the firm’s midtown Manhattan office, and James Biden laid out his vision
for the fund’s future. “Don’t worry about investors,” he said, according
to the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation. “We've got people all around the world who want to invest in
Joe Biden.”

At the time, the senator was just months away from both assuming the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his
second presidential bid. According to the executive, James Biden made it
clear he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who
could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We've got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.

At this, the executive recalled, Beau Biden, who was then running for
attorney general of Delaware, turned bright red. He told his uncle, “This
can never leave this room, and if you ever say it again, I will have
nothing to do with this.”

A spokesman for James and Hunter Biden said no such episode ever occurred.
Beau Biden died in 2015, at 46.

But the recollection of an effort to cash in on Joe’s political ties is consistent with other accounts provided by other former executives at the
fund.

Three former Paradigm executives said James and Hunter Biden also sought
to capitalize on Joe’s strong ties to labor unions in the hopes of landing investments from them; Charles Provini, who briefly served as Paradigm’s president, said both James and Hunter repeatedly cited Joe’s political
ties when they recruited him to work for the fund. “I was told because of
his relationships with the unions that they felt as though it would be favorably looked upon to invest in the fund as long as it was a good
fund,” Provini recalled.

Documents submitted as part of a legal dispute over Paradigm’s acquisition
show James Biden planned to solicit investments for it from union pension funds. A spokesman for James and Hunter said they did not end up marketing
the fund to unions.

As Joe Biden runs for the Democratic presidential nomination on the
argument he can strongly appeal to the party’s dwindling base of blue-
collar supporters, the candidate has often made the point that he hasn’t
gotten rich from his decades in politics. As recently as 2009, his net
worth was less than $30,000, though in recent years he has made millions
from book sales and speaking fees. He refers to himself as “Middle-Class
Joe,” and presents himself as a corrective to a system rigged by
financiers and networked corporate elites.

Biden’s image as a straight-shooting man of the people, however, is
clouded by the careers of his son and brother, who have lengthy track
records of making, or seeking, deals that cash in on his name. There’s no evidence that Joe Biden used his power inappropriately or took action to benefit his relatives with respect to these ventures. Interviews, court records, government filings and news reports, however, reveal that some
members of the Biden family have consistently mixed business and politics
over nearly half a century, moving from one business to the next as Joe’s stature in Washington grew.

None of the ventures appear to have been runaway successes, and Biden’s relatives have not been accused of criminal wrongdoing in their dealings.
But over the years, several of their partners and associates have ended up indicted or convicted. The dealings have brought Joe unwelcome scrutiny
and threaten to distract from his presidential bid.

A spokesman for Biden’s campaign, Andrew Bates, declined to comment for
this story. A spokesman for James and Hunter disputed several specific recollections of former Paradigm executives but did not address more
general questions about their business dealings.

Their ventures, over nearly half a century, have regularly raised conflict-of-interest questions and brought the Biden family into
potentially compromising associations. This investigation offers the most comprehensive account to date of the politically tinged business
activities of Biden’s brother and son, and is the first time former
associates of James and Hunter have alleged that the pair explicitly
sought to make money off of Joe’s political connections.

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Within weeks of the encounter at Paradigm Global Advisors, Beau Biden won
his race for Delaware attorney general, and never established any recorded
ties to Paradigm. His political career kept him well clear of his brother
and uncle’s business endeavors.

James and Hunter are another story. There is no indication the Bidens ever succeeded in bringing new foreign money into the fund, but their
involvement with Paradigm, which spanned the final two years of Joe’s
Senate career and first two years of his vice presidency, was troubled for other reasons: In James and Hunter’s five-year tenure, Paradigm became associated with a number of alleged and confirmed frauds, including Allen Stanford’s multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, while seeking to draw on
their powerful relative’s political allies for financing.

The pattern of dubious associations and possible conflicts of interest
would continue later with Hunter’s foreign dealings, which led him to a lucrative appointment to the board of a Ukrainian oil company and to deals
with firms connected to the Chinese state. But it started far earlier.

James Biden, known socially as Jimmy, is seven years younger than Joe and
a dead ringer for his famous older brother. He worked as a salesman and
served as the finance chairman of Joe’s first Senate campaign in 1972
before embarking on a career as a serial entrepreneur.

In the 1970s, as Joe was entering the Senate and taking a seat on the

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