Daily Wire
By Ben Johnson
Although President Joe Biden has been known to angrily confront reporters for what he considers overly harsh questions, the legacy media have taken it remarkably easy on the president and his family. While the media have circled hungrily around every potential charge facing Allen Weisselberg and remain focused on the Trump family, they have ignored multiple scandals facing Joe Biden, his son, and his brother. Here are just a few:
1. Joe Biden reportedly met with Hunter Biden’s business partners.
Emails and photographs retrieved from Hunter Biden’s laptop appear to show that then-Vice President Joe Biden met repeatedly with his son’s business associates, raising issues of influence peddling.
A photograph shows the then-sitting vice president meeting with Hunter and two business associates, Carlos Slim and Jeff Cooper, on November 19, 2015. The New York Post’s Miranda Divine reports that Hunter had spent much of that year pursuing Slim to invest in a number of business options, including Cooper’s online gambling platform, Ocho Gaming.
This would be at least the second meeting Biden allegedly attended with his son’s foreign business connections while vice president. As The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra reported, “Joe Biden reportedly met his son’s business associates from Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan at a dinner in Washington, D.C., on April 16, 2015.”
Biden’s campaign officially denied the Burisma-linked meeting, saying, “We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.” The Washington Post, citing a White House official with knowledge of Biden’s schedule, reported in June that the vice president dropped by to speak with Alex Karloutsos, a long-time friend who was at the event.
Although the White House has yet to comment on the latest allegations, the media seem content with their silence. While legacy media outlets offered endless coverage of Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous Trump Tower meeting, they have virtually ignored Joe Biden’s reported personal meetings with his son’s business partners — although such meetings are arguably more significant: Biden allegedly attended these meetings personally, and he did so after, not before, he had been elected into public office.
2. The scandals plaguing First Brother ‘Fast Jimmy’ Biden.
It’s become a national tradition for Democratic presidents to have shady brothers, from Billy Carter to Roger Clinton to Ted Kennedy. But each of those figures caused their siblings far greater media embarrassment with fewer scandals than first brother James Biden. The 46th president’s younger brother has raised the practice of grift to a fine art.
After taking over a global investing firm in 2006, Jim Biden told the company brass, “Don’t worry about investors. We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” Politico reported, citing a company 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.”
No other presidential sibling tried to leverage their brother to cash-in on Americans suffering from the wasting disease of cancer. When Jim Biden sought to invest in Integrate Oral Care in November 2018, Politico reports that Jim allegedly told the company he could get his brother’s Biden Cancer Initiative to promote the oral rinse that Integrate sells for use by cancer patients.
The FBI was reportedly investigating another health care company tied to Jim Biden, Americore Health, LLC, as of March 2020
James Biden has had similar luck throughout his charmed business life. Shortly after Joe Biden’s election to the Senate, Jim Biden’s Seasons Change night club received bank loans the terms of which could be described as unusually positive. Seven months after he became executive vice president of the fairly new entrant into homebuilding, the New Jersey-based Hillstone International, Hillstone won a $1.5 billion contract from the Obama administration to build housing in Iraq.
While the media presented the business deals of President Donald Trump’s children as an impeachable violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, they have hardly reported the name of Jim Biden, much less his virtually confessed lifelong history of profiting off his brother’s office.
3. Nepotism in the Biden administration.
The Biden administration is also a family affair when it comes to appointments. High-level Biden appointees secured the hiring of numerous family members, according to The Washington Post.
The little-known Biden aide Steve Ricchetti serves as a prime example, with three of his children serving in the executive branch. Politico reported on June 14 that “J.J. RICCHETTI will be a special assistant in the office of legislative affairs. He joins his sister, SHANNON RICCHETTI, who is a deputy associate director for the White House social secretary, and one of his brothers, DANIEL RICCHETTI, who is a senior advisor in the office of the under secretary of State for arms control and international security, in the Biden administration.” (Emphases in original.)
The problem? J.J.’s record of “accomplishment consists primarily of graduating from college — last year,” wrote Walter M. Shaub Jr. in The Washington Post. Thanks to apparent family favoritism, “The Treasury Department will lack the ideas and experiences that someone with a different background (and probably better qualifications) would have brought to the job. In years to come, the nation may miss out on that individual’s contributions as yet another Ricchetti heir follows a predestined trajectory through the halls of power.”
Richetti has company. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has three relatives “serving” in the Biden administration: brother Tom Sullivan is the State Department’s deputy chief of staff for policy; sister-in-law Rose Baumann Sullivan, Tom’s wife, is HHS acting assistant secretary for legislation; and Jake’s wife, Maggie Goodlande, serves as a counsel to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The Donilon family also struck gold during the Biden years. Biden senior adviser Mike Donilon’s niece, Sarah, is special assistant in the National Security Council’s Asia directorate (and the daughter of another Biden administration official, Presidential Personnel Office Director Cathy Russell). Mike Donilon’s brother, Tom, reportedly turned down consideration to become CIA Director, remaining instead at the think tank of BlackRock Inc. — which is also deeply embedded in the Biden administration.
President Biden appointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, as White House Cabinet secretary, which helps coordinate the various federal agencies.
White House spokesperson Jen Psaki’s sister, Stephanie Psaki, has been hired as an HHS senior adviser on human rights and gender equity inside the department’s Office of Global Affairs.
Biden’s senior adviser, Anita Dunn, is married to Bob Bauer, who co-chairs the presidential commission on packing the Supreme Court and runs an aggressive online “fact-checking” effort called Building Back Together, which is tied to the Biden White House.
Despite the abundant scent of nepotism, the media have largely ignored the story or dismissed it by engaging in whataboutism. The Washington Post reported merely that ethicists found it “disappointing that Biden didn’t shift even further from the practices of Donald Trump’s presidency, which they thought reeked of nepotism and cronyism.”
These underreported Biden administration scandals share a common thread: President Joe Biden seems to give his family, his cronies, and their families advantages that the average American would never see. That’s a story worth reporting.
This article originally appeared in Daily Wire.
