James Biden set to testify as part of impeachment inquiry into brother Joe’s role in family business
WASHINGTON — First brother James Biden is scheduled to appear Wednesday for a closed-door House impeachment inquiry deposition focused on President Biden’s role in his family’s business dealings.
James, 74, allegedly leveraged his brother’s political career to benefit both domestic and foreign business ventures, sometimes in partnership with first son Hunter Biden, 54, whose exploits are better known due to the release of sensational emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop that implicated his dad.
Republicans are expected to drill down on murky bank transfers totaling $240,00 from James to Joe Biden as well as press James for information on the 81-year-old president’s possible links to business relationships involving China, Mexico, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
It’s unclear how the first brother intends to handle sharp questioning — ahead of his nephew Hunter’s equally high-stakes appearance on Feb. 28.
One of James Biden’s best-known business partnerships — and a top likely source of questions — involves CEFC China Energy, the Chinese state-linked company that provided millions of dollars to the Biden family beginning weeks after Joe Biden left office as vice president in January 2017.
An initial tranche of more than $1 million was provided to Hunter and James Biden in March 2017 shortly after Joe Biden met CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming and was a “thank you” for past services in a relationship that began in 2015, former Biden family partner Rob Walker testified Jan. 26.
Joe Biden at one point was penciled in for a 10% cut in a joint venture with CEFC — a since-defunct reputed cog in Beijing’s “Belt and Road” foreign influence campaign — according to a May 2017 email from former family associate James Gilliar, who referred to Joe Biden as the “big guy.”
Former business associate Tony Bobulinski testified last week that he met Joe Biden and spoke about the CEFC partnership twice in May 2017 — further contradicting the president’s consistent claim he “never” discussed business with his relatives’ partners and that he “did not” interact with their associates.
Joe Biden later was name-checked by Hunter in a threatening July 2017 text message to a China-based associate, preceding by less than 10 days the transfer of another $5.1 million to accounts linked to Hunter and James Biden, according to information in a 2020 report by Republican-led Senate panels.
At one point, CEFC allegedly provided a credit card with a $100,000 limit to James and his wife Sara for a “global spending spree,” according to the Senate report, which House investigators say was corroborated by witness testimony.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) subpoenaed credit card records pertaining to James Biden last week after acquiring other bank account records last year.
James allegedly wrote a check containing $40,000 of his CEFC proceeds to Joe Biden on Sept. 3, 2017, as an alleged loan repayment, according to House Republicans, who say they have no record of loan paperwork and that the money flow is obscured by the fact that the original funds allegedly being repaid came from a law firm associated with multiple Biden relatives.
DECADES OF ALLEGED INDISCRETION
James Biden, known to associates as a “big Diet Mountain Dew guy,” according to former family partner Devon Archer, allegedly has made little secret of why businesses should pay him.
In 2006, when he and Hunter were in the process of taking over a New York City hedge fund, James allegedly said, “Don’t worry about investors, we’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden … We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash” Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger wrote in a 2021 book.
Joe Biden was at the time the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Politico reported this week that James Biden later again invoked his brother during a business call as he sought out a foreign investor for rural hospital company Americore in exchange for $600,000 in loans in 2018, including an initial $400,000 that January and a later $200,000 on March 1, 2018.
“One person on the receiving end of Jim Biden’s health care pitch recalled a phone call in which Jim Biden said he was sitting in a car next to his brother Joe,” Politico reported Sunday.
On the same day he received $200,000 from Americore, James wrote a check for an identical amount to his brother Joe, writing “loan repayment” in the subject line. The company went bankrupt without James Biden following through on his pledge to “obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections,” according to a court filing from the company’s bankruptcy trustee.
House Republicans and IRS whistleblowers note that in many instances in the Biden family’s business dealings, including cases involving Hunter Biden, income was described as loans as a potential tax-avoidance strategy.
Democrats said last year that all indications are that Joe Biden was simply being a good brother loaning James money for unexplained short-term reasons.
The top Oversight Committee Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, said last year that James Biden’s bank records “show that in 2017 and 2018, while President Biden was not in office, he provided two short-term loans to his brother, James, who repaid each loan within two months.”
Joe Biden’s own bank records have not been acquired by impeachment inquiry investigators.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to comment Tuesday when asked in a press gaggle about the first brother’s looming testimony.
In a possible previous of what he will say, James Biden’s attorney Paul Fishman told Politico for its profile of the first brother that he “conducted himself ethically and honorably in all his business dealings.”
DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN INTRIGUE
Joe Biden’s evolving policy positions on domestic matters such as asbestos and tobacco liability also are a likely subject for questions — as are his possible links to additional foreign enterprises.
In 2006, the law firm SimmonsCooper — associated with wealthy asbestos lawyer Jeff Cooper — invested $1 million into the hedge fund that Hunter and James Biden were taking over.
The same year, Congress considered asbestos reform legislation, in which then-Senator Joe Biden played a pivotal role in blocking a change that could have limited funding for payouts after lobbying by Cooper’s firm.
A Joe Biden spokesman claimed in 2008 that the money wasn’t linked to the bill and that the Biden family bank repaid the investment.
Cooper later partnered with the Biden family on business pursuits in Mexico during the Obama-Biden administration — including posing for a 2015 group photo with Mexican guests and Joe Biden at the official vice president’s residence and riding aboard Air Force Two for an official 2016 trip to Mexico.
James Biden was wiretapped by the FBI in 2007 — when his brother was still a senator — as part of a bribery investigation of Mississippi lawyer Dickie Scruggs, the Washington Post reported in December.
Biden, who was not charged in the case, was in talks with Scruggs and conspirator Tim Balducci about setting up a law firm that would have employed himself, his nephew Hunter Biden and James’ wife, Sara.
Scruggs at one point flew Joe Biden to a fundraiser on his private plane, the Washington Post reported.
Then-Sen. Biden went from opposing federal legislation to punish tobacco companies for lying about the addictiveness of cigarettes to a supporter after Scruggs — the architect of a multibillion-dollar litigation plan — paid James Biden’s lobbying firm $100,000 in 1998, the Washington Post reported.
“I probably wouldn’t have hired him if he wasn’t the senator’s brother,” Scruggs told the newspaper.
The Biden family’s links to troubled Mississippi attorneys spanned more than a decade.
Another disbarred Mississippi attorney, Joey Langston, who was convicted in a different bribery case, told House investigators in testimony made public this month that he loaned James Biden 800,000 in 2016 and 2017 during Joe Biden’s final term in office, but only got $400,000 back.
The troubled attorney, who had hosted fundraisers for Joe Biden, ProPublica reported, was unsuccessfully trying to overturn a bribery conviction in court in 2016 — raising intrigue into whether he was also seeking a federal pardon.
James Biden was involved in additional foreign ventures that have attracted scrutiny.
Emails found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop show that for a period in August 2017, James Biden had sought investments from the Qatar Investment Authority and shared a draft of a letter to one of its officials, Khaled Sultan Al Rabban, with the first son.
The construction company Hill International allegedly hired James Biden in 2011 to negotiate a secret deal with Saudi Arabia to settle a $140 million dispute over a desalinization plant built by a Hill subsidiary in the 1980s.
James Biden allegedly told Thomas Sullivan, a former Treasury Department official-turned-private investigator hired by a rival firm, that he attended a February 2012 meeting with Saudi officials at which Hill was to receive “final payment” for the desalination plant.
James allegedly told Sullivan that he had attended the meeting “because of his position and relationship” with his older brother, who was then the vice president.
Hill International CEO Irvin Richter allegedly told Sullivan that he retained James Biden because the Saudis “would not dare stiff the brother of the vice president.”
