On November 4, 2010, a longtime Biden family friend from Delaware, Kevin Justice, had a meeting in D.C. with the Office of the Vice President. At the time, Justice was the president of a construction company called HillStone International. A couple of weeks after the meeting, HillStone hired James as an executive vice president, despite the fact that James had no experience in the housing construction industry.
Do you notice the pattern?
(This deal is thoroughly documented in Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer’s book Profiles in Corruption.)
James’s company profile touted his only experience that really mattered: “James Biden was the finance chairman of his . . . brother’s bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Delaware and successfully enlisted the support of national unions, political leaders and financiers across the country.”
James joined HillStone at a fortuitous time: the firm was negotiating a massive contract in war-torn Iraq to build 100,000 homes. This was part of a $35 billion, 500,000-unit project, as Schweizer reported in Profiles in Corruption. HillStone also got a $22 million construction contract from the U.S. State Department. The company’s founder, David Richter, told investors at a private meeting that it really helps to have “the brother of the Vice President as partner.” For the years James worked with HillStone, the firm “accumulated contracts from the federal government for dozens of projects, including projects in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mozambique, and elsewhere.”
Yes, Mozambique… and “elsewhere.”
On February 14, 2023, the Daily Mail reported that James Biden admitted in legal filings that he was hired by Hill International, the parent company of HillStone, to “negotiate with Saudis over a secret $140 million deal” because of his relationship to Vice President Joe Biden, who at the time was leading delegations to Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal (right) meets with Vice President Joe Biden in Riyadh on October 27, 2011. ((Credit: AFP via Getty Images)
The case documents reveal that on at least two occasions, “Jim told a former senior U.S. Treasury official working as a private investigator” that he was “often sent to meetings to represent Hill because ‘of course, the [Biden] name didn’t hurt.’” Hill CEO Irvin Richter further confided “that he selected Biden because KSA [the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] would not dare stiff the brother of the Vice-President who would be instrumental to the deal.”
Jim’s wife, Sara, also claimed in official affidavits that “Joe and his brother ‘told each other everything.’”
Lamentably, this influence peddling is as legal as it is flagrant.
In the system Joe Biden built, influence peddling is legal for anyone willing to put in a little effort to find one of any number of loopholes. (Read more: Breitbart, 10/22/2023) (Archive)