Out of all the topics the Joe Biden White House didn’t want to see in Sunday’s Washington Post, this had to be up there on the list.
The capital city’s newspaper of record published recordings Sunday of President Joe Biden’s brother, James, engaged in scoring off his famous last name during the late 1990s.
The fact that the recordings were made by FBI investigators couldn’t have made things easier in the Biden household either.
The Post article was headlined “James Biden’s dealmaking caught on FBI tapes in unrelated bribery probe,” and just the words alone had to be unsettling at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
According to the Post, the tapes came to light after the Post received permission to review archives at the University of Mississippi compiled by author Curtis Wilkie, who wrote a book about attorney Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, a larger-than-life figure in the law world who engineered the landmark $248 billion 1998 legal settlement with the tobacco industry over its sales of a cancer-causing product.
Scruggs’ career didn’t end with the tobacco settlement — that took until 2007, when he was snared in an FBI sting operation trying to bribe a Mississippi judge.
And it was in that snare that James Biden’s voice recordings appear — not involved in bribery himself, but clearly as a figure whose last name meant a good deal to those trying to curry favor in Washington.
Scruggs, according to the Post, got to know the Bidens while he was trying to get a tobacco settlement through Congress. He needed Joe Biden’s support for that. And for that, he turned to James Biden.
“I probably wouldn’t have hired him if he wasn’t the senator’s brother,” Scruggs told the Post, echoing similar words that would later be spoken about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
Should there be a larger investigation into the Biden family?
“Jim was never untoward about his influence,” Scruggs said, according to the Post. “He didn’t brag about it or talk about it. He didn’t have to. He was the man’s brother.”
To be clear, the conversations where James Biden was recorded by the FBI were taken down as part of an investigation of Scruggs and his associates — not James Biden.
But they did capture a flavor of James Biden’s influence peddling — and that was just when his brother was a senator, not the vice president.
Two of the tapes are in the X post below.
The first is of Tim Balducci, a lawyer and Scruggs associate who was planning to go into business with James Biden and another man as partners in a “consulting group,” as the Post put it. He was describing to James Biden a conversation he had with Scruggs about his hopes for the fledgling business.
“I told him we had formalized our relationship with you guys,” Balducci told Biden in the Sept. 27, 2007 conversation, according to the Post.
“I told him about the real Washington presence, that this was not going to be a bulls***, you know, a shingle hung somewhere in the window. That this was a real deal, that Sara was coming on, you know, as a named partner, an equity share in the venture, that we were changing the name of the firm to include her. … Hunter was going to be involved, and you were going to be involved.”
Yep. With Hunter and James Biden — along with James’ wife, Sara — this was going to be the “real deal,” all right.
The second is of James Biden speaking — apparently again to Balducci — on Oct. 15, 2007, about James Biden’s potential role as a consultant for the chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who had applied with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to use 100 acres of tribal land to open a $375 million casino. That would need approval at the state and federal level, which is where the “consultant” work would come in.
Check them out here:
Listen: James Biden’s dealmaking caught on FBI tapes.
In the article, WAPO is accusing Joe Biden, James Biden, and his wife, Sara Biden, of being involved in influence peddling:
“What emerges is a tale of money, politics and influence, stretching from Mississippi to the… pic.twitter.com/K0466W0LRq
— Eddie (@ICU1010) December 17, 2023
“You know my hesitancy to be a, you know, an opportunist if everybody is jumping on” the Choctaw leader, James Biden said. “There’s nothing wrong with opportunist. Sara just rolled her eyes at me. So, but being a whore about it, OK, you know, like everybody just jumping in, like, ‘Let me do your insurance, let me do your legal.’”
Well, heaven forbid anyone should think of the word “whore” in relation to any Biden. (It’s more polite to refer to Hunter’s doxies as “prostitutes.”)
Nothing much ever came from either phone call. As the Post reported,the new “consultant” firm of Balducci, James Biden and Steve Patterson, a man whom Joe Biden met through his Senate colleague segregationist Democratic Sen. John Stennis.
Patterson was a Stennis aide who had gone on to become the chairman of the Mississipp Democratic Party and chairman of Joe Biden’s first campaign for president in 1988.
Just before it was going to open for business, though, Balducci had what must have been an unpleasant discussion with the FBI, who confronted him with trying to bribe a judge on Scruggs’ behalf. Balducci became an informant against Scruggs.
That kind of thing can put a crimp in new business plans. In a further crimp, Patterson ended up caught in the snare and served two years in prison, according to the Post. Scruggs got about five years for his role in the judge-bribing case as well as another case, according to the Post. And Balducci got two years, according to WLBT-TV in Jackson, Mississippi.
So, out of three potential business partners in the “consulting group,” two ended up in federal prison, and one is still the brother of the current president of the United States.
That should make Americans comfortable knowing the Biden family is so above reproach.
According to the Post, the White House declined to answer written questions about the case.
James Biden’s attorney, meanwhile, downplayed any interaction between the Biden brothers in a business sense.
“Jim Biden’s consulting work has never involved speaking with or providing access to his brother for this or any other client,” the attorney, Paul J. Fishman told the Post, presumably by email.
As to the conversation that included the “whore” line, Fishman told the Post that James Biden “was discussing a potential opportunity to sell insurance to the Choctaw tribe, but he never pursued that business.”
And as to James Biden’s involvement with Balducci and Patterson, Fishman told the Post, “more than fifteen years ago, Jim and Sara Biden had serious discussions … about starting a firm that would provide legal and consulting services. That venture never got off the ground. Jim and Sara were not aware of or involved in any unethical or illegal behavior” on the part of Balducci and Patterson.
Of course not. Why would anything think otherwise? It’s just that damnable Biden luck that the family keeps running across crooked Mississippi lawyers, dodgy foreign business associates, top Chinese spies, and who knows how many lithe, attractive Eastern European women of uncertain virtue?
What might be the most interesting part about this whole exercise, though, is exactly why The Washington Post is looking into it now.
This is the newspaper, after all, that’s been carrying Joe Biden’s water since he announced for the presidency in 2019.
It’s part of the cabal of establishment media and social media giants that downplayed the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 to an almost criminal degree.
But now it’s actually interested in some breath of scandal surrounding the Biden family’s tortured history of shady dealings?
Regardless, it’s a good bet this is not what the Biden White House wanted to see in this Sunday’s local newspapers.
