Biden: Hiding In Plain Sight

Authored by Charles Ortel via American Thinker,

American voters who struggle to enjoy the benefits of “Bidenomics” understand that Joe Biden and his family likely never earned an honest living while Joe was senator, vice president, or president.

Now that iconic Democrat Robert Kennedy, Jr. has called for a serious investigation into suspicious wealth accumulation by the Biden family during the President’s long career chiefly as a “public servant,” one might be tempted to get lost in minutiae and go far back over years of evidence to see whether impeachment and conviction are warranted in 2023.

In truth, there is a simpler approach: focus on the strange and dramatic increase in Joe Biden’s personal fortune from his time as vice president starting early in the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency in late January 2017, using tools hiding in plain sight in the public domain. Begin with the final days of the Obama-Biden administration. We have yet to learn the complete truth concerning what was discussed in the Oval Office when a coterie of top officials including Obama, Biden, and Comey met there on January 5, 2017.

This was only weeks before Donald Trump and Mike Pence took the reins of the Executive Branch on January 20, 2017. Moreover, Republicans were destined to take control over the House of Representatives and the Senate with a clear majority in the former body, and much slimmer control over the latter. Much might have been lost for key Democrats and their allies in the bureaucracy, had the incoming Trump administration enjoyed free rein to direct investigations into suspicious activities of many in the Obama-Biden administration. During eight long years while “fundamentally transforming America,” Barack Obama and others likely had positioned themselves to garner outsized financial returns in retirement from public service, following the examples set by Bill and Hillary Clinton from 2001 onwards. With so much at risk and with so many domestic and foreign challenges and uncertainties swirling, one wonders exactly why Joe Biden decided to take a brief trip over to Ukraine and to Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, returning to Washington, D.C. right before Inauguration Day.

Without doubt, a raft of paper and electronic records exists somewhere that will eventually shed light upon why Biden needed to spend crucial last-minute time with principals whom some believe have been orchestrating financial payments to the Biden family and their associates using murky means for years. These records, which IRS and FBI investigators surely considered examining at some point since 2017, remain relevant to any fair inquiry into the Biden family for monetizing Joe Biden’s influence over key American policies while he held high elective offices. According to public accounts, Biden and Obama lunched regularly at the White House to compare notes and coordinate making progress implementing key policy initiatives. Perhaps Obama and Biden (who each used alias email accounts while serving in the White House) marveled at the bold ways in which Hillary Clinton and her aides operated while she served as Secretary of State, and as Bill Clinton claimed that he directed affairs of “his” presidential foundation.

Yet, unlike the Clintons, Biden had little to show financially from his long career in politics when he departed the vice-presidential residence.

According to detailed information, Joe and Jill Biden declared a total of $4,122,376 in pretax income on their federal tax returns for tax years 2001 through 2016 — this works out to an average of $257,648 annually during the sixteen-year period when he finished his career as senator and, later, became vice president. Leaving aside, for the moment, fair questions concerning how Biden managed to sustain living costs for his large family from his home in Wilmington and also save for retirement, his years with educator Jill Biden do not appear to show proven ability to derive investment income, or garner outsized compensation. Yet, things were to change dramatically and for the better, days following the beginning of the Trump-Pence administration.

Trump and Pence inherited a stumbling economy after the anemic Obama-Biden recovery and the disastrous final years of the Bush-Cheney administration. According to data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey put out by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the top ten percent of households in America saw their pretax incomes decline 8.3 % from $269,644 (on average) in 2016 to $247,174 (on average) in 2017.

In stark contrast, Joe and Jill Biden saw their pretax income climb from $338,464 in 2016 to a whopping $9,578,639 in 2017 — an amount that was more than 28 times Biden pretax income for the prior year and more than twice, in just one year, total Biden pretax income for a 16 year period from 2001 through 2016.

What accounted for this enormous Biden family windfall in a single year, when even the top 10% of American households suffered pronounced declines in their pretax incomes? Initial answers found in Biden tax returns warrant further inquiry, including whether the IRS line agents trying to investigate suspicious Hunter Biden activities were restricted in plowing what appears now to be fertile ground in his father’s joint tax filings for 2017. Buried back on page 23 of a 103-page tax filing for 2017, we learn that two subchapter S corporations, each formed in 2017, somehow managed to send more than $10 million dollars together in their first partial years of operation, to the Bidens.

The first entity — CelticCapri Corp — generated $9,490,857 for the Bidens in just eleven months of existence during 2017. This total amount is more than $860,000 per month, which represents a heroic if not completely unbelievable result for a start-up. What products or services did CelticCapri provide? Who else was involved operating this business? How were other participants compensated? And, what pre-formation actions were taken before late January 2017, when CelticCapri was formally organized in Delaware? The second entity — Giacoppa Corp — made $557,882 for the Bidens in nine and one-half months, or more than $58,000 per month in a start-up year and the same sorts of questions raised about CelticCapri should be answered about Giacoppa. The American people deserve to understand why the IRS, FBI, and Department of Justice rarely target difficult-to-explain wealth-building by dynastic political families such as the Bidens and Clintons, but mount furious assaults against families like Donald Trump’s which built outsized wealth for decades, well before entering politics. Let truly serious investigations begin.