Joe Biden’s brother and son have a long history of profiting off his name

 

While Democrats want the press and voters to concentrate on President Trump’s phone call with Ukraine, “the problem for Democrats is that a review of Hunter Biden’s career shows clearly that he, along with Joe Biden’s brother James, has been trading on their family name for decades, cashing in on the implication — and sometimes the explicit argument — that giving money to a member of Joe Biden’s family wins the favor of Joe Biden,” argues Ryan Grim at The Intercept. Trump’s behavior may be shameless, Grim says, but that doesn’t mean Biden’s history isn’t an issue, he writes in this excerpt:

In trading on his father’s name and power to advance his career, Hunter Biden is following in the footsteps of James Biden, Joe’s younger brother.

It began small. In 1973, one year after Joe Biden was elected to the Senate at age 29, James Biden opened the nightclub Seasons Change with what Politico, referencing contemporaneous local reporting in Delaware, called “unusually generous bank loans.”