Barons of the Beltway by Michelle Fields

Author:Michelle Fields
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

2. Joe Biden

In April 2014, violence erupted in Kiev between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian nationalists. At the center of the conflict was natural gas, with Ukraine accusing Russia of hiking gas prices. It was the kind of complicated geopolitical crisis that receives the attention of the world’s finest foreign policy minds. And Joe Biden’s.

Vice President Biden has been wrong, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates once wrote, about “nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Nevertheless, the White House put Biden at the helm of solving the energy situation in Ukraine by sending him to offer advice to Ukrainians on how the United States could assist them in expanding their production of natural gas.

One month after the trip, in what may just be an incredibly unbelievable coincidence, Joe Biden’s son landed a key position in the Ukrainian gas industry.

You know…the industry that is front and center of the Ukrainian crisis.

It was announced that Burisma Holdings, the largest private gas producer in Ukraine, had hired Biden’s son Hunter–right in the midst of the Ukrainian crisis. The company also announced that it would hire Devon Archer, a family friend of Secretary of State John Kerry. Archer was the college roommate of Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz–the H. J. Heinz Company heir. Archer’s job at the gas company is to attract investors from America and expand the company’s operations.9

The appointment of the vice president’s son to the largest private Ukrainian gas company–at a time when the United States is working to help Ukraine become less dependent on Russia for oil–appears awfully suspicious. However, the White House and Biden’s spokesperson were quick to assure the media that there was no conflict of interest. Right.

While the White House didn’t see any conflict of interest, the rest of the world saw it as a “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch my back” scenario. It appeared as though the vice president’s trip to Kiev was more about securing a position of employment for his son than about actually doing work.

Nor was this the first time Biden may have used his position and influence to help out Hunter. Thanks to Dad’s cozy relationship with a top executive at MBNA, the giant credit card company in Biden’s home state of Delaware hired Hunter to a cushy position, from which he was quickly promoted to senior vice president. This was the same MBNA that paid that top executive, John Cochran, $300,000 in “moving expenses” after he bought Joe Biden’s house for almost two times what it was worth.10

In 2002, Hunter decided to move on to bigger and better things. With the help of his dad, he became a founding partner at the lobbying firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair. William Oldaker was Joe Biden’s adviser during his unsuccessful 1988 presidential campaign. (Presumably he wasn’t the one who advised Biden to plagiarize a speech from a British Labour leader.)

During Hunter’s time as a lobbyist, one of Dad’s friends–the then senator Barack Obama–helped him out by seeking more than $3.

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